


Half Past Adventure, Season 1: Princess Pauper

by Pablo360



Series: Half Past Adventure with Macy and Robin [1]
Category: Adventure Time
Genre: Acid Burns, Additional Warnings Apply, Adopted Children, Animal Death, Anticlimax, Astral Projection, Bad Decisions, Bad Faith Accusations, Bad Poetry, Bad Puns, Birds, Blood and Injury, Breaking the Fourth Wall, Brutalism, Burns, Candy, Cartoonish Depictions of Villainy, Character To Be Revealed Later, Child Abandonment, Children, Children of Characters, Coffee, Coma, Commemorative Coins, Comparative Literature, Competition, Cyborgs, Death, Detective Noir, Digression, Disco, Dishonesty, Dreams, Due to the Dead, Dungeons & Dragons References, Eggs, Empathic Powers, Established Relationship, Extended Metaphors, Feelings of Inadequacy, First Crush, Florid Language, Foreshadowing, Four-Square, Friendship, Frogs, Furniture, Gangs, Gen, Go Fish, Graphic Description of Candy, Gratuitous Prefixation, Gratuitous Reference Humor, Guilt, Hallucinations, Head Injury, Hubris, Hunters & Hunting, Hybrids, Hypocrisy, Implied/Referenced Backstory, Implied/Referenced Miniature Golf, Implied/Referenced Politics, Implied/Referenced Time Travel, Impromptu Funeral, Impulse Purchases, Inanimate Objects, Incompetence, Inspired by West Side Story, Irony, Isolation, Korean Characters, Lesbian Character, Letters, Literary References & Allusions, Magic-Users, Memorials, Mystery, Neologism, Nightmares, Nonbinary Character, OC-heavy, Organized Crime, Original Character(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Overreaction, Panic Attacks, Peanuts & Tree Nuts, Pedantry, Pharmacology, Politics, Post-Canon, Post-Finale, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prophetic Dreams, Public Display of Affection, Public Nudity, Purple Prose, References to Ornithology, Retirement, Rhymes in Cinema, Rivalry, Running Away, Sandwiches, Shapeshifting, Smoking, Social Anxiety, Spaghetti, Spontaneous Power Acquisition, Stimming, Subtext, Subversion: Liar Revealed, Superstition, Symbolism, Tags Are Fun, Tea, The Moon - Freeform, Theft, Those Coins with a Hole in the Middle, Trials, Trusses, University Dropout, Word salad, baby gays, chemical burns, disorganized crime, drug metaphor, ecoterrorism, ennui, grape soda, heck, herbal remedies, miniature golf, nonbinary characters - Freeform, shoelaces
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2020-03-04 21:09:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 175,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18820774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pablo360/pseuds/Pablo360
Summary: Ooo is a land of magic.  Nearly one thousand and thirty-seven years after the devastating Mushroom War set civilization back to the Stone Age and unleashed hell on Earth, and exactly seven years after another war, set to be even more devastating, was narrowly averted, the world seems to be at peace.  All is not perfect, but it's pretty mathing good.  The heroes of the Gum War have all moved on.  In nine hundred and seventy years, their story will be told anew, to a pair of wasteland scamps thriving in a post-apocalypse of their own.  But this is not that story.  Not yet, at least.For now, this is the story of a little girl — an orphan of twelve years who wanted nothing more than to be a hero — and her best friend, and how this child who dreamed of adventure would find both it and a family in the last place they'd expect: a castle.





	1. The Royal Banquet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Macadamia and Masse Yvoire, two orphans in Princess Cookie's Candy Orphanage, go exploring during a banquet hosted by Princess Bubblegum.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea of starting the fic off with a royal banquet was inspired in large part by the first episode of Adventure Time to air, Slumber Party Panic, and in small part by the need to fix a chronology for the series as soon as possible. This banquet is the anchor around which the rest of Half Past Adventure's timeline is built. It's also the reason for the name: It marks the moment thirty years after the end of the show, and “half past” means thirty in the language of clocks (I apologize if this is obvious, but you can never take for granted which expressions transcend regional dialect and which don't).

“How do I look?”  To a twenty-first century human, the question would seem bizarre.  It’s not that the question itself is odd; it’s a perfectly normal interrogative quip in day-to-day conversation.  The context wasn’t what was odd either, per se; the speaker, a girl of no more than twelve years, was getting dressed for what might have been called a date were she a few years older, but instead was merely a play-date.  In such circumstances, it would have been natural for a teenager to be preoccupied with her appearance, as she adjusted the buttons on her technicolor jacket, fiddling with the collar and observing herself in the mirror; and thus it is also natural for a child, pretending at adulthood as children often do before they become adults and pretend at childhood, to say such a thing, half-acting, half-meaning, and half-casting a spell to turn one into the other — the sort of spell whose power comes not from any book, but from that cradle of infancy, the limitless power of imagination, which for all but the lucky fades with age.

It must then have been the speaker of the question which would seem so ridiculous to an inhabitant of that ancient prehistory we call home.  Not her age, certainly; as has been established, the playing of a child at a level of maturity beyond her own is perhaps the most natural thing in the world.  Possibly it would have been her situation; one would not of course have expected an orphan to have much occasion to get dressed up. This, however, is not an innate quality of orphans but a comment on the typically-dull conditions of the twenty-first century orphanages against which they set their expectations.  One would certainly have raised an eyebrow at an orphan’s ability to acquire such an ostentatious, prismatic jacket — ah, but this was the _royal_ orphanage, nacht; nothing but the best for all her subjects was the way Princess Bubblegum treated her kingdom.  Indeed, the prevalence of absolute monarchy would probably have perplexed a modern viewer far more than any of the factors listed thus far.

No, the bizarreness of that “How do I look?” would almost certainly derive entirely from the fact that the speaker was a three-foot-tall macadamia nut with arms and legs, named, fittingly enough, Macadamia.

“Abso-globbing-great,” replied her jacket.

“I can’t believe I’m going on a date with Masse Yvoire!” squeed the burnt-umber nut girl, putting on her best affectation of a teenager — more a parody than an impression, gleaned from her forebears, the oldest to get adopted from the candy orphanage, who learned it from their forebears, who learned it from their forebears, who probably learned it from the old, pre-Mushroom-War sitcoms Princess Bubblegum would occasionally show to the orphans when she visited.  Despite being a distant cousin of a copy, its infectiousness seemed to only amplify with each iteration, producing a feedback loop that would probably someday engulf the whole Candy Kingdom in a valley girl singularity.

“He’s, like, the most popular guy at the orphanage,” she continued, because that was the sort of thing a teenage girl in a sitcom would say, and so it was her duty to say it.

“Knock it off, Macy,” said the jacket, lightly slapping her cheek with zhir collar.  “I heard if you copy a TV show too much, you _become_ a TV show.”

“As if,” she said, tucking her sleeve back down.  “Come on, Robin. We’re not TV show material. Just a couple of orphans in Princess Cookie’s orphanage.  We’re a fanfiction at best.”

“That’s not true at all,” argued Robin playfully.

“How so?”

“I’m not an orphan.  I just hang out here all the time on account of my mom’s a deadbeat and my dad’s — I just hang out here all the time.”

If Macy noticed the stutter, she paid it no mind.  Satisfied that she looked how an imagined teenage version of herself would consider stunning, she headed out the door of her room — the room she shared with five others — and into the orphanage common area.  The common area was small and cozy, to put it nicely. A portrait of Princess Bubblegum and her wife, finger painted by children fingers too thick for finger painting and only recognizable for what it represented by the pink-and-grey color scheme, hung proudly and lopsided over a war-weary red couch.  The paint on the walls, still sticky from a recent touchup, was already chipping once more from the toil of play. There were at once too many and not enough children; too many because one would prefer there to be no need for orphanages, and yet not enough because, this being the largest orphanage in the Candy Kingdom, one would expect it to be larger.

The air felt molasses-thick, as though the anticipation of tonight’s festivities had taken on physical form and was now a syrup through which the orphans swam, as they filed half-excited and half-dazed into a pair of lines by the door.  Macadamia found her place in line next to Masse Yvoire, a white chocolate chip with whom she got along like a bird who got along with another bird. For as long as either of them could remember, they would play together, talk together, sneak out together, get caught together, apologize together, bake Princess Cookie a cake to make up for worrying her together, and tonight they would go to the royal banquet together.  Granted, the rest of the orphanage was going too — the entire kingdom was invited — but that was just a technicality.

“Everyone here?” called Chipper.  Chipper, like all the chips, was smaller than all but the youngest of the orphans, an ovalesque helper who reminded Macy of a tiny, much darker Masse.  In truth, Macy was weirded out by the chips; she couldn’t tell them apart at all, even after living at the orphanage for the past eleven years of her twelve-year life, and she was never truly certain as to whether they consisted of their own unique individuals or were extensions of Princess Cookie’s self since they seemed to spend most of their time in special indentations on Princess Cookie’s body.  Fortunately, she was not yet educated enough to question whether or not that distinction held any real meaning.

The orphans began to sound off, an exercise comforting in its routineness.  The wave of affirmation started at the front of the line and slowly worked its way back, the delay between consecutive “Here!”s decreasing with the attention span of the children.

“Is your weird rainicorn-dog friend with you?” whispered Masse, leaning in toward Macy conspiratorially.

“I’m right here,” Robin whispered back.

“Here!” shouted Macy and Masse, noticing the brief pause in the wave of accounting that indicated a stalling out.

“Yeah, that’s what I said,” said Robin.  “Here.”

Macy rotated her whole torso from side to side, the closest to shaking her head in consternation she could pull off with her awkward nut physiology.  “You’re silly,” she chided.

“Weird is more like it,” grimaced Masse.  “You’ve got too many powers.”

“I don’t have _that_ many powers.”

“You do, though!”  Masse was now hissing.  “And the fact that you’re oblivious to it is even more annoying than the fact that you have them in the first place!”

Robin didn’t move, but zhir voice was now directed directly at Macy.  “Do I really have _that_ many powers?”

“Let’s see,” pondered Macy, pretending to tally her friend’s powers on her fingers.  “In addition to flight, phasing, rainbow magic, and minor telekinesis just from being a rainicorn, you’re also one-fourth crystal spirit on your mom’s side and one-sixteenth shapeshifter on your dad’s side.  You can change your shape at will, you can go six days without breathing, and if I’m recalling correctly you once, completely by accident, talked to your great-aunt Bronwyn through your dreams.”

“Yeesh.  Robin sagged.  “That really _is_ a lot of powers.”

“That’s because you’re super awesome!”  Macy ruffled her jacket shoulder; Masse rolled his eyes at the bizarre display.

At that moment, as if sensing that reality itself needed an excuse to transition to a new scene, Princess Cookie descended the pink spiral staircase of the orphanage, his right hand clutching the brass guardrail for support.  Princeso, as the orphans called him, was an alumnus of the Candy Orphanage himself; his life in between leaving the orphanage and returning to run it was a mystery, apart from the fact that along the way he came into possession of a tiara woven from a single robin’s egg forget-me-not, which he tended to as lovingly as he did all of the orphans under his charge, and that somehow he had injured his leg so severely that even Doctor Princess couldn’t fix it completely, lending him a permanent limp which acted up when agitated.

The children of course came up with their own stories for what had happened in the meanwhile, which they passed around as if it were fact.  Some said that he was the rightful heir of the Grasslands, and that he was secretly raising the children to be his army to overthrow Princess Bubblegum and claim his birthright.  Some said that he was dating a space alien and sending them information on Ooo customs so they would be ready to throw a party when they finally made first contact. Some said that he was an adventurer, and even that he was really the one who drove GOLB away thirty years ago; of all the theories, Macy disbelieved this one the least, since Robin said zhir grandpa T.V. said his dad Jake said he knew Princess Cookie back in the day, and was one of the few people to call him Snaps.  But the one constant was that they all loved him, because he gave them extra sugar, and let them stay up past their bedtime when they were quiet, and brought them toys and special visitors, and never laughed at them when they told him what they wanted to be when they grew up, and always wanted to help them become whatever it was.

“Okay, children, it’s time to head out” announced Princess Cookie in that voice that was at once gentle and firm, calming yet authoritative, sharp enough to draw the attention of even the most distractible children but not sharp enough to sting.  He sidewalked to the front of the room, legs crossing over each other and body facing the children, as if he were looking each of them in the eye and thinking, _“You are more precious than anything in the world and I will always love you.”_  “Are all of you accounted for?”

“Yes, sir,” said Chipper, flat palm over his nonexistent brow in a comical parody of a salute, all the more comical from how earnestly non-parodical it was.  Macy suppressed a snicker. Masse did not.

Princess Cookie snickered too, playing along as if harmonizing to a familiar song.  Chipper, defeated, hopped back into his hole.

“Let’s head out to the banquet!”

And all the children cheered and followed their Princess out the door.

* * *

The banquet was hosted in the great mess hall of Bubblegum Castle.  To the untrained nose of the twenty-first-century human, the royal mess hall, like any other place in the Candy Kingdom, would have simply smelled like candy; to the candy people, this is too broad of a term to be of any use.  Yes, the great hall where royalty made of candy sat on chairs made of candy before china made of candy to eat food made of candy of course smelled like candy — but so did the orphanage, with its love-worn carpets and its piles of discarded candy-paper craft supplies that seemed to pile up as quickly as they were cleared; so did the streets, where the unlucky non-pedestrian would need to wait behind several large riding animals and a perpetual motion machine of candy people just to cross a block; so did the parks, where even the birds were made of chocolate, and only cost a dollar seventy so get them while they’re hot; so did the back-alleys, full of half-slumbering patrons that Dirt Beer Guy couldn’t justify giving yet another drink, where Macy and Masse sometimes hid, giggling, always under the impression that Princess Cookie had no idea they’d snuck out, never quite knowing why they did it.  Each of these candy smells was vastly different from the others. But the royal mess hall, moreso than any of these other places, was _sweet_.

“Sweet,” exclaimed Robin softly, zhir horn glowing underneath the back of zhir collar as it sniffed the air.  “This place rocks!”

“It’s so… regal,” observed Masse, pawing the tall back of the chair where he had been directed to sit by a lollipop girl wearing the uniform of the Bubblegum Castle staff.

“Thanks,” said Macy as the lollipop girl pulled out her chair.  “What’s your name?”

“Lollipop Girl,” replied Lollipop Girl.

“Well I’m Macy, and I’m gonna be an adventurer!”

“That’s nice, sweetie.”

Satisfied with that interaction, Macy looked around the room at the other guests who had arrived.  The mess hall, the largest room Macy had ever been in, was packed. A lot of the people in attendance she recognized as having visited the orphanage before, either as special guests brought in by Princess Cookie or simply looking to adopt.  Many she recognized from the various magazines and contemporary histories that Princess Bubblegum insisted the older orphans read so they would be aware of the state of the world to the same extent as other children. There was some overlap between these two groups, mostly consisting of VIPs in the Candy Kingdom; almost all of those people were clustered in one area near the head of the table where the royal family was seated.  Princess Bubblegum, her wife Marceline, her aunt the Grand Vizier Lolly, and her children the Peppermint Prince and Princess Torte were all wearing matching pink ensembles, although the prince and queen accented theirs with copious amounts of black.  The people clustered around them, on the other hand, were so uncoordinated that it almost seemed deliberate — the Slime Princess, with her rhinestone-studded yellow poncho making her amorphous body look like a banana peel; Colonel Candy Corn, a loose-fitting military uniform barely disguising his hunched back; old Professor Petrikov, whose own pink sweater, clearly chosen to match the royal family, clashed against his green undershirt like some terrible afterthought; the Earl of Lemongrab in his typical grey uniform, hand locked with the Lumpy Space Princess and her dress of polychromatic scales; not to mention the lustrous Lady Rainicorn and her canine husband Jake, Robin’s great-grandparents on her father’s side, who of course never wore anything, except today for matching ashen hats with little ribbons on their rims.

And then there was Finn Mertens, champion of the four great kingdoms and many-times savior of Ooo.  Finn, who fought the Lich, incarnation of evil, at the edge of space. Finn, who stopped dread Orgalorg when the beast was set to absorb the power of the Catalyst Comet.  Finn who, by betraying Princess Bubblegum, saved her and ended the Gum War before it began. There he stood, in the flesh, in an azure suit with a black bowtie, a jagged white sword at his back, a monitor in his robotic hand, a few strands of his majestic golden locks peeking out of the white bear cap that covered his head, in the same room as Macy for the first time since he visited the orphanage all those years ago and she decided that, whatever he was, she wanted to be it.

Her heart began to pound.  Would today be the day he took her under his wing, just like in her dreams?  Did she dare drink from the chalice of destiny that most dangerous draught? She could picture it now:  She and Finn, riding Jake off into the sunset, he with his sword, she with a bow, to slay whatever monsters lurked under the horizon.  The autumn breeze carried a hint of spice, perhaps from the chefs of the nearby village; ah yes, the windmill was coming into view now.  These people were like she once was, small and helpless and green. But now she was big and strong and brown, and she had a bow made of willow with a string made of grass, and she would defend them just like her hero…

“…for gathering here today, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Gum War,” pronounced Lolly, in a quavering voice that seemed not frail but strong for its regular vibrato.  A hush had fallen over the crowd, and everyone had taken their seats. Macy realized, with a blush, that she had zoned out again.

“Riding off into the the sunset, huh?” whispered Robin.  Zhe had slipped into Macy’s dream somehow; zhe’d probably disguised zhirself as zhir great-grandfather.  Macy blushed harder.

“You know Wolfwood Mills is a popular romantic vacation spot, right?” zhe continued.  “I heard the townsfolk rent out the windmill to us ‘big people’ as a sort of apartment.”

“Shush!” Macy was now blushing so furiously she was afraid it might be visible through her thick, opaque outer casing.  “I’m trying to listen to Lolly’s speech.”

“Lolly just finished talking.”  Masse shook his head and clucked in disappointment.  Of all the times to space out, Macy had done so while a royal was giving a speech. The two of them were made rebels, yes, but to ignore the words of the wise and just aunt of the princess regnant just seemed uncouth.

Princess Bubblegum was now standing up, holding a microphone made of pistachio ice cream.  She did a quick mic check, then winced as a massive hum of feedback threatened to shatter the saccharine glasses of the banquet guests; after waiting a few seconds to get an okay from the sound engineer through her well-concealed earpiece, she began speaking, a little louder than she intended.

“People of the Candy Kingdom and honored guests!” she began, her strong, commanding voice instantly commanding the attention of everyone in the room, even those she did not make in a laboratory beneath the castle.  “As my grand vizier was just explaining, today is the thirtieth anniversary of the Gum War, which was heroically averted—”

“Hmph!” pouted Colonel Candy Corn, and nobody was quite sure whether that was intended to be private.

“—which was heroically _and thankfully_ averted,” amended Bubblegum testily, glaring at her disgruntled captain of the guard, “by my knights Finn and Jake, and then by Aunt Lolly, all three of whom acted against the wishes of their superiors and should be commended for that.”  That last part, too, was directed at the colonel; she didn’t turn away from him until she reached the end of the sentence. Macy felt as though she had just read a tiny passage of a story she’d never be able to find in full.

“It’s also,” the princess continued, “the thirtieth anniversary of the arrival of GOLB, the world-eater, and its banishment from this world through the heroic sacrifice of Betty Grof, who used the power of the Ice Crown to…”

She paused and scanned the room quickly, seeing a sea of blank, confused faces.  “…to banish GOLB from this world,” she finished, apparently deciding that whatever she was going to say before would have been too complicated for her citizens to understand.

“The heroes of that day have been rewarded for their heroism,” she went on.  “No reward could possibly be enough to compensate for what they did, of course, but what we could give, we have already given.”

“She says that as if she wasn’t also one of the ‘heroes of that day’,” muttered Masse, and Macy wasn’t sure of he was accusing the princess of humility or arrogance.  Knowing him, it was probably the former.

“Today, we celebrate the martyrs:  Fern Mertens, the last casualty of the Gum War, who helped to fight off GOLB’s monstrous minions even as he was dying; and Betty Grof, who gave up her…”  She scanned the crowd again. “Who defeated GOLB at the cost of her life. Once again, attempts have been made to honor their legacy, such as the planting of the Great Tree, but today they are honored for the first time as a pair; and that is why they will be honored in two ways.  At this time I would like everyone to look under their chairs. On the bottom of the seat,” she clarified hastily.

In unison, everyone in the mess hall scooted their chairs backward and started pawing at the undersides.  Several seats fell over, pieces of their tall back breaking off into rose quartz rock candy. Macy’s own chair was nearly one of them, but Masse and Princess Cookie helped catch it before it hit the floor.  “Thanks,” she muttered as she grabbed a small round object that had been taped to the bottom of the chair.

It was a toonie — a two-dollar coin — purple and raised-edged, three inches in diameter, with a small beveled pentagon in the middle.  The last time Macy had a toonie was when the orphans had taken a trip to the arcade. Macy, Masse, and one other kid — someone whose name she couldn’t remember, who had since been adopted — had snuck out and spent all the money they had been given for the arcade on foam weapons that blew away in the wind before they got back to the others.  They had no idea how to count large numbers of coins, so they gave too many to the shopkeep, so much so that he gave them a toonie as part of the change for the foam weapons. At the time, it had seemed like a miracle; in retrospect Macy figured he was probably trying to offload an awkward piece of coinage that wouldn’t normally be useful in change-making.  She didn’t remember what the toonie got spent on. Still, at the time it had seemed a symbol of freedom, of the amazing nonsensical nature of the world she and Masse would grow into. Later, she would try to get into coin collecting, in an attempt to recapture that magic (she was ten, it seemed like a good idea), but she gave up partway through (again, ten) and spent her collection on a book that had illustrated descriptions of all the various coinages of the many kingdoms of Ooo.

This coin had different iconography than any she had seen in that book, though.  The mottos engraved on either side of the coin were the same: “Nächstenliebe ist Mut” on the face, “Frieden ist Erlösung” on the flip.  Inspiring words, she was sure, if she had remembered any of the German that Princess Cookie had tried to teach. But rather than the familiar right-facing profile of Princess Bubblegum, or the left-facing one of Queen Consort Marceline that was on some collectable coins, the face of the coin held a portrait of an unfamiliar-looking woman with a tall conical hat and large round glasses; Macy figured this must be Betty.  On the flip, where a normal coin would depict Bubblegum Castle, or the four-candy crest, or possibly a bowl of spaghetti, she therefore expected to see Fern — who, when rendered by embossing on monotone lavender, would probably just look like Finn with more hatching-lines — and was therefore surprised to see an image of a large flowering tree on a hill with a sword barely visible in its top branches. The Great Tree, supposedly planted in honor of Fern; he never really understood what was so great about it.  Perhaps there, too, was a story with which she was unfamiliar. Or perhaps not; perhaps the Princess was just fond of horticulture.

Macy fingered the toonie, the memory of the last time she held it at once immediate and distant.  There was a strangeness to the familiarity of it; the cold, firm suppleness of the metal-gum alloy, the faint smell of chrome that somehow overpowered the aroma of candy, the alluring perfection of that hole which begged to have a string wound through it — it was like waking up and not being sure if everything around her was reminding her of a dream she couldn’t quite recall, or if she’d forgotten it already and her mind was simply filling in the gap with the first thing it encountered.

“Sometimes a dream that seems scary is just something familiar viewed from a different angle,” Princess Bubblegum had told her when she visited and Princess Cookie told her liege about Macy’s nightmares.  Macy hadn’t wanted anyone but Robin and Masse to know, but Robin had insisted on telling Princeso, and he trusted Princess Bubblegum implicitly. The advice had helped a little — it at least helped Macy rationalize the phenomenon and believe Robin that she wasn’t crazy — but it sounded like an echo, like something the Princess had heard from someone else and not really understood herself.  Absently, Macy wondered if the Princess ever had nightmares, and if they were anything like her own: formless, logicless things where inane problems became paralyzing anxieties and the whole world judged her for her every flaw. She doubted it. She was nearly a teenager, so she understood by now that grownups had problems of their own, but she hadn’t yet realized that they still carried all the problems of childhood along with them.

“Hey, you gonna eat that or do you want me to?” asked Robin.  Macy shook herself out of her reverie. Twice in a row was a bad omen.  If she zoned out a third time during the banquet she’d lose something important, she was somehow sure.  The last time—

She slapped herself back to attention.  “Don’t you dare,” she scolded jovially. She scooted her chair back in and turned her focus on the savory spaghetti piled on her plate, the pungent odor of garlic from the bread slice on the side making her sway.  She dug in.

When the banquet was wrapping up and about half the guests had asked the servers to take away their plates, Grand Vizier Lolly announced that things were still getting set up outside and that the first floor of the castle was now open to visitors who wished to mill about in the meantime, presuming everyone got back on time for pudding.  Macy, who had just finished at that exact moment, pushed her chair back, stretched, farted, pretended she hadn’t farted, conspicuously avoided direct eye contact with Masse, and wordlessly stepped away from the table.

“Wanna check out the castle?” she whispered to Robin, taking off her jacket.

“Why are we whispering?” Robin whispered back, gradually reverting to zhir normal color and shape.

“Because this feels conspiratorial.”

“It’s not, though.”

“Right, but it feels like it should be, you know?”

“No.”

Robin in all zhir glory was an unmissable sight.  Zhe sat in a tightly curled, pyramid-shaped spiral three meters tall, but when zhe unwound she went past seven.  Zhir body was colored in five long stripes — white, tan, green, blue, and black, from top to bottom — like a bizarre rainbow, and on zhir head were a small ivory horn and a set of breathtakingly bouncy black jowls.  Zhir eyes were rubies — not merely red, actual rubies — and zhir fluffy tan tail was decorated with buttons.

“Anyway,” zhe said, “I’m gonna go say hi to my great-grandparents.  It looks like poppoppop just ordered fourths, so I’ll probably need to catch up with them before his girlfriend makes him leave.”

“Girlfriend?  You mean your grandnanny?  Aren’t they married?”

“No,” zhe said, as if that weren’t unusual.  “You want to come with?”

“I’d be too nervous,” sighed Macy.  “Your poppoppop and grandnanny are legendary.  Plus, there’s Finn, and he’s like my hero! _And_ they’re all hanging out near Princess Bubblegum.  I’d be too starstruck to speak.”

“Alright.”  Zhe raised zhir eyebrow as zhe said that word, like there was something else zhe wanted to say but had barely enough tact not to.  “Is there anything you want me to ask him for you, then?”

 _Yes, a million things._  “No, that’s okay.”   _Dammit!_

“Alright,” zhe said, lifting the middle of the word like a cat by the scruff of the neck.  “I’ll just ask him about that tiny computer monitor he’s been carrying around.”

“I think that’s actually part of his arm.”  Macy allowed herself one more glance at Finn.  She had initially thought he was holding it before because of his arm’s orientation, but it was actually some sort of fold-out monitor embedded directly into the chassis of his robotic limb.

“Wow, you can make out that kind of detail from that far away?”  Robin whistled, and a flutter of dancing lights and tingling ozone responded to the sound as if a tiny piece of the universe were dancing to zhir song.  “Either your eyesight is really good, or mine _sucks_.”

“Your eyes are gemstones.”

“They always did say I have my grandfather’s eyes.”  Zhe winked; a tiny part of Macy’s mind still found the image of a gemstone winking unsettling.

“You weirdo,” she laughed, angry at herself for finding one of her two best friends unsettling, glad when zhe went across the banquet hall to talk to zhir family, and even angrier at herself once more for being glad.

Before she could have the dreaded third zone-out, Masse jolted  her to attention by grabbing what passed for her shoulder. “What’s on your mind, Macy?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she lied, knowing he wouldn’t press further.

“If you say so.  Hey, c’mon, wanna explore the castle?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Okay, sure.”

“Yesssss!” He clenched his upraised fist as if grasping his victory before it could flutter away in the breeze like a foam sword.

Princess Cookie saw them heading off and called out to them.  “Be sure not to get lost; the castle can be pretty confusing if— and they’re gone.”  He shook his head. “They’re gone. Chipolina?”

One of the chips hopped out of her hole in Princess Cookie’s back.  “Yo yo baws whaddup?”

“Go in the general direction of those two just in case they need help.”

“I will become one with the shadows,” she intoned, flattening herself on the ground to the best of her ability and synchronising her footsteps with those of a passing candy citizen so as to blend into their umbrum.

“No, you don’t need to do that, really.”  But it was too late; Chipolina was one with the shadows.  Princess Cookie shook his head again and sighed a light yet tired sigh.  “Sometimes, I swear it feels like they’re more childish than the orphans! Jeez, we’re like the blind leading the blind over here.”  He paused. “Damn, that _really_ doesn’t fill me with confidence over whether those two’ll be okay.”

He started to get up to tail Chipolina, but then he saw two of the other orphans smearing steak on each others’ faces and went to break it up.  Chipolina would have to got this herself.

* * *

 “Is that the same banana guard again or are they all just clones?”

By the time Masse had worked up the nerve to ask the question out loud, both he and Macy had wondered it silently at least a half dozen times.  The castle was a maze of twisty passages, all alike in dignity and austerity, but with much less ornamentation than was depicted in art of the castle’s interior.  Perhaps, after their second child entered the scene, the royal family had taken down anything that might be a potential hazard for curious hands; or perhaps the Princess was just going through a minimalist phase.  After all, there comes a time in every woman’s life where she must make the decision whether or not to base her entire aesthetic around the absence of any aesthetic, to accept the song of silence into her heart, and to trick herself into believing that something can be so boring that its very dullness is interesting.

“I’m the same banana guard,” said the same banana guard, standing in front of the same door, in a pharyngealized voice it was impossible to take seriously.  “Banana Guard Number Seventeen. Also we’re not clones, the Princess says we’re duomiliquadragintoctuplets.” He beamed with pride after he finished the last word.

“No, she said we _weren’t_ duomiliquadragintoctuplets,” called an identical- yet female-sounding voice from the other side of the door.

“Aw.”  Banana Guard Number Sixteen hung his head and let the butt of his pike hit the floor with a loud thump.

“Sorry I asked,” said Macy, although she hadn’t asked and wasn’t entirely sure why she felt sorry for the guy.

“Point is,” Masse observed pointlessly, “we’re lost.”

“It was your idea to explore the castle,” chided Macy, whose idea it had been to explore the castle even before Masse had suggested it.

“Yeah, well.”

They walked in silence until they reached the next bend in the hall.

“We should have asked that guard for directions,” they groaned in unison.

“Well, now it’s too awkward to go back!”  Macy was gesticulating enthusiastically and meaninglessly, because that was what a teenager in a prehistoric sitcom would do.

“Better to wait until we pass him again,” agreed Masse with the unassailable certainty of a child.

And so they walked in silence, slowed by the weight of their shame, so that their footfalls, lighter for all that they seemed heavy, faded into obscurity.  And in this contemplative state they went about the great circle of their confusion until—

“Glob math it, someone’s following us.”

“Are you sure?” Macy whispered back, glancing around.

“I could hear their footsteps.”  Masse pointed to a dark ventilation shaft.  “In there.”

Macy peered into the shaft, without turning her head so much as to make it obvious.  “It’s just Chipolina,” she said, at a normal volume.

Chipolina noisily removed the grate, noisily jumped down, noisily jumped up to noisily slam it shut, then jumped into Macy’s shadow where it fell behind her and became one with it, noisily.

Macy and Masse exchanged a puzzled look.  “You know there’s no point to hiding anymore, right?” asked Masse.

“There being a point was never the point.”  Chipolina made a series of gestures with her arms that Macy could barely make out as an attempt to look like a ninja without being seen.

“So anyway.”  Masse resumed walking, Macy and Chipolina following suit.  “I was just thinking we should head back to the mess hall. Exploring the castle has been fun and all, but it’s not like there’s really that much to see.”

“Didn’t we decide to do that a while ago?” queried Macy.

Masse leaned close to her and whispered.  “I don’t want Chipolina to know we’re lost; it’s embarrassing.”

Macy nodded subtly in understanding.  “Nevermind, I guess we didn’t,” she intoned.

“Well then where were you going?” asked Chipolina suspiciously.

Macy’s mind raced, trying to think of a location in the castle she knew about from one of her books.  If only she’d paid better attention to the parts that weren’t about heroes doing heroic things! “The… uh… the…”

“The garden,” supplied Masse.  “We were going to the garden.

“Well, why didn’t you say so?”  Chipolina parkoured off a wall unnecessarily and landed in front of the pair, arms outstretched in self-congratulation.  “I know where that is. Follow me!” She whirled around and began marching forward. Macy and Masse looked at each other, shrugged, and trailed behind the chip.

* * *

 

“…and that’s the story of how I saved Raggedy Princess from a tornado — and from herself,” concluded Jake, and then everyone clapped.

“Wow, poppoppop!” exclaimed Robin, who for convenience had shrunk down to fit on the table in front of him, curled into a ball, mimicking the long, rainbow-colored unicorn Lady Rainicorn sitting on the chair beside Jake.

“나는 남자 친구가 방금 말한 이야기에 또한있었습니다,” said Lady.

“I know!  You’re so cool, grandnanny.”

“Yeah, my girlfriend is so cool!”

“Yeah,” agreed Finn nervously.  He leaned down to whisper in Robin’s ear.  “I have no idea what she just said.”

Suddenly there was a great rumbling noise, like a tremor before an earthquake, as if Ooo itself, sorry for what it must soon do, were giving an advanced warning to the people living on its surface, letting them know through those vibrations that more were coming, so that they could do what little can be done to prepare in the face of nature’s wrath, hoping that just once fortune would smile on the prepared moreso than on the lucky.

“My bad,” apologized Jake, raising his paw.  “That’s my stomach. The little pup’s room is calling me.  I’ll see you in an hour probably.”

Perhaps because walking would upset his stomach too much, or perhaps just because he didn’t feel like using his knees, Jake stretched the top half of his pure yellow body out of his chair and turned it down the hallway; and then, when his head was out of sight, presumably having put down his front paws, his elongated spine contracted, taking his backside with it.

“So cool…” whispered Robin, stars in zhir eyes.

“때로는 그가 자신의 낯선 외계인 아버지로부터 물려받은 능력에 너무 의존하고 있다고 걱정합니다,” sighed Lady.  “나는 당신이 아무데도 걷지 않을 정도로 게으르지 않기를 바랍니다.”

Robin laughed sadly.  “I wish. I can’t seem to make myself any bigger than my usual size.  I guess I’ve got so many powers that all of them are weaker than they should be.”

“Don’t let that get you down, man,” said Finn, putting a finger of his non-robotic hand on zhir tiny shoulder.  The motion was practiced, as if he were used to comforting people who could fit in his palm. There was something paternal about it that Robin liked.  “I didn’t inherit any cool powers from my parents at all, and I’d like to think I turned out okay, all things considered.”

Zhe nodded slowly, zhir head tilted to the side.  “Yeah, I guess.” A beat. “I’d better get back to my friend.  But before I go, she wanted me to ask you, what’s with the monitor?  I don’t remember that being on your arm the last time I saw you.”

“Oh, this?”  Finn raised his arm and closed his eyes for a half-second; the monitor popped up and the screen turned on.  There was a woman’s face on the screen, with hair that looked just like Finn’s under a white cap with two bumps and a black T, the recognizable symbol of the Helpers.  “It’s so my mom can attend. She ascended to machine consciousness thirty-seven years ago, and her robotic avatars aren’t programmed for formal events, so Prubs — I mean, Princess Bubblegum — and Gridface Princess programmed a Helpernet node into my arm.”

“Hello there,” said the woman, her voice coming from a speaker further up Finn’s arm.  “My name is Doctor Minerva Campbell. And who might you be?”

Robin slithered onto Jake’s chair and grew back to her normal size.  “Dr. Campbell! I’m a big fan; I’ve taken _all_ your anxiety pills.”

Finn and Lady each gave a feeble, obligatory chuckle, while Dr. Campbell continued to smile absently.  “Let me see if I can find your patient records,” she said, zoning out. “Ah yes, Robin V., rainicorn-dog.  Current primary care physician is Dr. Poundcake. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about your experience with the Candy Kingdom’s medical system?  I’m very much interested in getting a third-party opinion on how it operates.”

“Of course!” exclaimed Robin, forgetting what zhe had said only moments prior about needing to get back to zhir friend.  Someone valued zhir opinion! To zhir, it seemed a rare miracle. In truth it was not so rare as zhe believed, but the mind has a funny way of exaggerating problems.  So zhe digressed.

* * *

After following Chipolina down a meandering sequence of hallways they were one hundred percent sure could not have been the most direct path to their destination, Macadamia and Masse Yvoire came at last to the palace garden.  The garden was an open space in the middle of an inner courtyard, with yellow candy-stone foodpaths arrayed in haphazard fashion through a colorful menagerie of flora.  Blossoming bushes in all colors and sizes sat in curving rows in the dirt islands separating footpaths, interspersed with patches of flowers, greenery, and the occasional tree.  A banana guard in a patchwork garden apron tended to a column of ivy growing on a square fence near one of the far corners; at the other, there was a massive wrought-licorice gate, one of the smaller side entrances to the castle, near which two other guards sat on a bench examining a sketchbook, presumably on break. Before the orphans could further take in the beauty of the scene, however, their attention was pulled to the fourth and final banana guard, standing in front of the gate, pike at the ready, shouting at an unseen person on the other side.

“Listen, I don’t care what Finn and Jake said.”  His baritone voice, deeper and less pharyngealized than the other guards, had a scolding quality to it, reminding the kids of a disappointed Princess Cookie.  “They’re not my boss. Bonnibel Bubblegum is my boss, and she said you’re not allowed to come in here after what you did the _last_ twenty-seven times.  Capiche?”

“But the last time was eleven years ago!” whined the unseen stranger from the other side of the gate, a note of desperation in their voice.  “Surely there’s some sort of statute of limitations on—”

“Hey, buddy, I’m just trying to do my job, alright?”  Now the banana guard seemed pleading. He relaxed his grip on his pike, letting it hang at an angle.  The two banana guards on the bench set down the sketchbook on the seat between them and looked up, riveted.  The one tending the ivy paid no heed.

Chipolina stood, stark still and silent, rooted to the floor of the castle like a shrub.  She blanched with fear, looking a little bit less like her siblings and a little bit more like Masse.  He and Macy, on the other hand, crept forward, intrigued. Who was this mysterious uninvited guest, who seemed to know Finn and Jake?  What had he done to get himself banned from the castle? Who was this guard who referred to the Princess as Bonnibel? The answers would probably not interest these children in the slightest, had they even the context to understand them, but the questions themselves were tantalizing.  Thus they crept forward, clinging to the wall of the garden as if that would in any way make them inconspicuous, and continued to listen to this drama unfold.

“Maybe you’re right,” continued the guard on duty.  “Maybe Bonnibel should have rescinded her ban on your attendance by now.  But she specifically told me that you weren’t to come in, and I’m gonna be honest, since _she_ paid my tuition for art school after the university _you_ sponsored turned me down, I’m not about to break protocol on your behalf.”

“Sir, I beg of you!”  Now the children were close enough that Macy could just make out his profile through the bars — a figure dressed in formal attire, short for an adult but still tall to a child of twelve, with the brown-carapaced skin of a nut person.  She stopped short. There weren’t very many nut people in the Candy Kingdom, especially not in the capital city, which was quite confusingly also known as the Candy Kingdom. Most lived in the Nut Kingdom, presided over by Princess Peanut.  Macadamia had seen very few nut people in person; she had always felt like an anomaly. Could this person be…?

“At least let me speak to the Princess!” pled the nut.  “I’m sure she could find it in her heart to forgive me, if only I could talk to her!”

“No, dude,” groaned the banana guard.  “That’s not my job. My job right now is to guard the castle while the banquet’s going on.”  He gestured in the direction of the kids. “Now leave before I have to make you leave, which I really don’t want to do in front of children but will if I have to.”

“Ohhhhhh!” the guards on the bench shouted in unison, spectators in a sports match where the ball was about to be the nut man’s rear.

He got the message.  “V-very well,” he stammered, then dashed away, quickly becoming out of sight.

There was a tense moment of silence before someone above them started clapping.  Soon the other guards joined in — even the one tending the ivy — followed by Macy, Masse, and finally Chipolina.  The banana guard blushed and bowed.  “I’m just doing my job, sir.”

“Nonsense!” came a gruff voice from a balcony overlooking the garden, presumably the one who had started the round of applause.  It was old Colonel Candy Corn himself, still in that ill-fitting uniform; now Macy could see that he was also clutching a red-and-pink candy cane that looked as cracked with age as he was.  “What’s your name, Banana Guard?”

“Banana Guard Sixteen.”

“Banana Guard Sixteen, look forward to a promotion in your future.  That was excellent.” He picked up his cane and pointed it over the edge of the balcony at Macy and Masse.  “Wouldn’t you agree, children?”

“Yes, very excellent, sir!”  Masse rushed the word out, as if afraid that were he to take too long to say them they would exit his body through a less pleasant path.

“Um, I guess,” muttered Macy.   _Was it really necessary to be so harsh?_ she wondered, but in the face of the Colonel’s charisma dared not say aloud.

“You guess correctly!  Now—” Suddenly the cane slipped from his grasp and landed with a thud in the garden below, sticking straight upright out of the ground so that it seemed to be a deliberate feature of the garden.  The colonel managed to catch himself on the railing of the balcony, grunting at the jolt as his posture found its new equilibrium. “Banana Guard Four Hundred Seventy-One, could you bring my cane back up to me?”

“Okay,” said one of the banana guards on the bench.  Her voice was much more like Banana Guard Seventeen’s; perhaps Sixteen’s odd voice was an anomaly.  She picked up the sketchbook as she got up and handed it to Sixteen. “Here’s your artbook back,” she said.  “It was very nice.”

“I should hope so,” he laughed.  “It’s not like that art degree is doing much work for me.”

As 471 went to retrieve the Colonel’s candy cane and the Colonel inched inside clutching the railing with one hand and his back with the other, Macy and Masse approached 16.  “If you don’t mind my asking,” inquired Macy, “who was that man?”

“What, you mean the guy I just told off?”  16 glanced past the gate and then turned back to the kids.  “That was the Duke of Nuts, one of Bonnibel’s vassals. She’s _suuuuper_ pissed at him for some reason.  Has been for as long as I can remember, which—”  He leaned in closer and began whispering. “—which is a lot more than most of the other guards can, tell you the truth.”

He stood back up, smirking, as Macy posed the obvious follow-up question.  “Why is the Princess so mad at him?”

“I don’t know the details and I don’t want to.  Knowing details makes my job way too complicated.  All I know is it’s happened twenty-seven times so far, and whatever it is, it’s serious enough that he can’t get back in Bonnibel’s good graces but banal enough that she hasn’t tried to throw him in prison for thirty-five years.”

“Why do you call her Bonnibel?” asked Masse.  “That’s disrespectful. You should address her as Princess Bubblegum.”

16 raised his eyebrow quizzically.  “You’re a real stickler for tradition, aren’t you?”  Masse furrowed his brow at this and took a dramatic step backward as if he had just been called something far worse.

“I call her Bonnibel because that’s her name,” continued 16.  “She’s helped me out on more than one occasion, but she’s always made it clear that she’s just a person.  She doesn’t care to be groveled at, no matter what that stuffy old colonel says. He worships the ground she walks on.”

“He didn’t during the banquet,” recalled Macy.  “He seemed upset when she talked about how Fern ended the Gum War.”

“Yeah, I could see it.  The dude’s got massive warlust.  He got his military title in the last big war three hundred years ago, before us banana guards were a thing, and he’s been craving something like that ever since.  Actually,” he speculated, his free hand stroking his chin, “I’m pretty sure he was made for that war; he probably came out of Bonnibel’s lab already a colonel. That might be why he’s so aggressive.”

“Is that—”  Macy hesitated, not sure if she should press further.  She did anyway. “Is that why he liked the way you handled the Duke of Nuts?”

A smile crept up 16’s face; he took his hand away from his chin and patted Macy on the head.  “That’s pretty perceptive of you.” Macy backed away, embarrassed; 16 put his hand behind his back and turned to the grate.  “I can’t say for sure, and frankly it’d be irresponsible of me to speculate. I shouldn’t have done as much speculation as I already have; I’m just a guard.”  A beat. “I bet the Duke is going to try the other side gate, if he hasn’t already. The one by the chocolate aviary. You can probably catch him if you hurry.”

“Why would we want to catch him?” scoffed Masse.

“I don’t know.”  Macy heard a lilt of amusement in his voice.  He glanced back at the two of them. “Why did you ask about him in the first place?”

Macy would not bring herself to answer.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”  And he turned back to face the wrought-licorice gate.

Macy and Masse walked back to where Chipolina stood, still rooted firm, staring at the empty balcony where Colonel Candy Corn had been.  They each grabbed her by an arm, dragging her away from the garden and back into the castle.

When they had gotten about ten feet down the halway, they both stopped in unison.

Macy smacked her forehead.  “We should have asked him how to get to the aviary.”

“Well, it’d be too awkward to go back now.”  Masse scuffed his ankle on the floor nervously.  “Let’s just get lost again so we can run into Banana Guard Number Seventeen.”

They began retracing their steps to try and find the place where they were lost before.  Macy hadn’t thought to keep track of the winding hallways on their way to the garden, but with Chipolina apparently still either in shock or awe from what had occurred, she was in no state to guide them.  Luckily, Masse had paid more attention to directions, so they soon found themselves back near Banana Guard Number Seventeen and the door he guarded. Macy wondered why Masse hadn’t paid so much attention when they first set out to explore the castle.  Perhaps that had simply been part of the thrill, or perhaps he had been distracted by their conversation. Macy could not recall what the conversation was about, but presumably it was something distracting.

As Masse walked up to the guard and began asking for directions, Macy felt Chipolina finally begin to stir; she let go of the two kids’ hands and climbed back into a nearby vent pipe.  The banana guard didn’t seem to notice, which Macy felt was very irresponsible of him. Absently, she reached into her pocket to grasp the coin she had found beneath her seat, only to remember that she wasn’t wearing any clothes and thus did not _have_ a pocket.  She had dropped it!

Frantically, she looked around, hoping beyond hope that it was somewhere nearby.  Nothing. Panic began to set in. Masse interrupting her daydream must not have counted, and now she’d lost something, she knew it.  It was her fault for not staying focused. Now the coin was gone, and whatever metaphorical significance it held, she would never know.  This was it. She started kneading her fingers violently and began to hyperventilate.

Then she saw movement down the hallway and, grateful for the distraction, pursued it.

The thing she saw did not flee as it heard her approach; in fact, it came toward her.  At first she did not recognize the towering blue figure, with five eyes arrayed in a radial pattern on the top of its face like sunrays on the horizon at dawn, its long thin limbs ending in appendages that were equal parts hand and paw.  Then an image flashed in her mind — part of an illustrated storybook about one of the modern heroes of Ooo — and she realized who it was.

“Jake?” she asked shyly.  “Jake the dog?”

“That’s the one,” he replied.  The voice, at least, was the same.

“What happened to your hat?”

“Oh, uh, I took it off.  Don’t worry, I’ll put it back on later,” he reassured her.

“Why would I be worried?”

“I dunno.”  He reached into a pocket he’d shapeshifted into his belly and pulled out a coin.  Macy’s coin. “You dropped this.”

Trembling, Macy reached out and took it.  “Thank you,” she whispered, staring up into his slanted, alien eyes.

Jake laughed, and in the laugh there was the hint of something somber.  “Hey, no problem. Didn’t want you losin’ that as soon as you got it.”

“I will always remember this.”  Macy was clutching the coin close to her chest.  She would not let it go again, not until she put on some pants at the very least.

“Yeah, I know you will.”  Jake tilted his head. “I mean, sure, yeah, whatevs.  Hey, aren’t you my great-grandkid’s friend?”

Macy nodded slowly.

“I know you want to be a big-time hero like me someday, so lemme give you some advice.”

“Like Finn, but go on.”  Macy was still nodding.

“I’m gonna ignore that.  The motto on that coin you’re holding is part of the motto of the Candy Kingdom.  The face says ‘charity is courage,’ and the flip says ‘peace is salvation.’ If you’re gonna be a hero, you need to figure out what those mean for yourself, and maybe someday you’ll be ready to hear the rest.”

Macy stared at the coin, turning it over and over with the tips of her fingers, staring at the hole in the middle as it disappeared and reemerged with the irregular oscillations.  The image of of Betty, her nose eclipsed by the hole, on one side; the Great Tree, its meaning still a mystery, on the other; the mottos associated with each — even knowing the translations, it was still a mystery to her.

“What do you mean by—”  But when Macy put down her hand, the coin still tightly clenched in her fist, and looked up, Jake was gone.

Shrugging, she went back to Masse, who by the looks of things had finally communicated his intentions to Banana Guard Number Seventeen and was in the midst of receiving directions.  The guard was pointing this way and that, so although Macy couldn’t quite make out what he was saying, she still ended up getting the gist of it. Just as Macy got back into earshot, Masse shook the guard’s hand and said, “Thank you very much for your help.”

“Yay!” exclaimed the guard, clapping quietly.  “I’m a helper!”

“What are we waiting for?” asked Macy.  “You’ve got your directions; let’s hurry so we can catch the Duke!”

Masse ran ahead of her.  “I don’t get why you’re so intent on tracking this guy down.  He’s probably banned from the castle for a reason, you know.”

“Yeah, duh.  I want to know what that reason is!”

“That’s not really why you’re doing it, though.”

“…”

“You think he might be your father.”

Macy ran in silence for the rest of the trip.

She knew it wasn’t true, of course.  Her parents, or possibly someone close to them, had left her on the doorstep of the Candy Orphanage when she was a baby.  There was no conceivable reason that could happen if her father were the Duke. (In truth, there was one conceivable reason, but Macy could not conceive of it.)  Still, a small part of her felt like even those long odds demanded investigation. Maybe she would learn that she was destined to be a hero! Somehow.

She thought again of her encounter with Jake.  He had returned her coin to her so fast that it was almost like she hadn’t lost it.  Perhaps, then, her aborted third fantasy hadn’t counted after all, and she wasn’t destined to lose anything tonight.  Still, his words haunted her. He seemed to think she was going to be a hero after all; in fact, he had appeared rather sure of it.  This should have excited her. But she could only think of the mysterious advice he had given her. What did it mean, to learn the true meaning of the Candy Kingdom’s motto?  What was “the rest of it”? The toonie only seemed to grow more perplexing as the night went on. Perhaps soon, even the whole in the middle would acquire some strange significance — the way it necessitated constructing the designs of the face and flip around it, how it framed the world in a five-sided box when she looked through it.  As she had turned it, she kept wondering whether something was supposed to go through that hole. Perhaps Robin could shapeshift herself through it. To what end, Macy had no idea.

She ran smack into a wall.  She had zoned out for real.

She groaned as Masse helped her to her feet.  “Math this.” Now she really _was_ going to lose something.  She couldn’t believe she’d had an out like what happened with Jake and she’d squandered it.  She was such a goofball.

“Are you worrying about losing something?” asked Masse, now holding her hand as they continued to power-walk toward their destination.

“Yeah,” admitted Masse.  “How’d you know?”

“Because I know _you_ , silly.  I wouldn’t worry,” he added, turning toward her with a soft smile on his face.  “It’s just a silly superspition, after all.” He couldn’t quite pronounce the word right, but Macy couldn’t quite tell it was wrong, either, so it was fine.

It wasn’t long after that they reached the chocolate aviary — another plant-decorated inner courtyard, this one home mostly to lemonjon trees and candyfloss grass.  Cocoa birds flew this way and that, making nests out of pocky, pulling gummy worms out of the dirt, singing their mating songs atop flourishing everblue trees. It was quite a sight to behold.  There were birds of all shapes, sizes, and varieties of chocolate, from little hummingbirds of purest cacao hovering by the lemonjon buds, to white-chocolate ducks swimming through the cinnamon reeds in the spiced chocolate pond, to a single great eagle made of a strange red variety of chocolate — a special brand of cherry chocolate made in the Wildberry Kingdom, Macy would later learn — which loomed as large as the Morrow, that legendary bird which served as Princess Bubblegum’s primary mode of transportation.

There were only two banana guards in this room, one standing by the gate on the far side and another feeding raw cocoa powder to some birds by a fountain; there were also a few guests wandering around, as well as Princess Torte, Princess Bubblegum’s second child, cooing with some chocolate doves.  The guests, Candy Kingdom citizens who were thoroughly distracted by her adorable majesty, did not notice Macy and Masse’s arrival; the two managed to get all the way up to the massive gate before the guard on duty heard their footsteps.

“Haha, hey there,” she said, turning slightly to face halfway between the grate and the children.  “Do you want me to open the gate?”

Macy had the feeling the guard was not supposed to say that.  “No, thanks,” she said hastily.  “We’re just… waiting for someone?” She shrugged. “Yeah, that seems right.”

“Are you waiting for your parents?”

Macy’s heart caught in her throat.

“Definitely not,” said Masse, whirling Macy around by her shoulder.  “He isn’t your dad. He’s just some random jerk who happens to be a nut.”  He paused. “Macy, you’re obsessing.”

She sniffled.  He was right, of course.  She had let herself get carried away.  There was no real reason to think this duke had any connection to her.  And if he did, why would that mean anything? If he was indeed her father, he abandoned her for no reason.  Would that be better? She didn’t know. She didn’t want to think about it.

 _Speak of GOLB and he shall appear._  The Duke of Nuts suddenly came running up to the gate, out of breath.  His formal attire, dark purple with gold trim, complete with a matching poofy hat, contrasted with his harried appearance.  He stooped over and rested his arms on his knees, then raised a single finger before looking up, straight into the Banana Guard’s eye.  “Need… speak… princess…” he panted. “Invited… Finn… Jake… seek… permission… enter.”

“Okay,” said the banana guard, turning around to face the guests in the aviary.  “Princess Torte?” she called.

“No… meant… oh… fine,” wheezed the duke.  He adjusted his hat before it fell off his head.

The little princess looked up from her doves.  “Yeh?” Her voice threatened to break, reminding Macy that they were in fact the same age; somehow this made her presence all the more intimidating.  As she approached, followed obsequiously by the gaggle of guests that had been watching her playing with the birds, Masse gave a performative bow; Macy simply stood flustered.

“Wuzzit?” she asked blearily, rubbing her eyes.  There was a hint of cooing in her voice, as if she were slowly shifting her brain from dove-speak to people-speak.

“This man wants to speak with you,”  said the guard.

“Oh, princess!” exclaimed the duke, who had seemingly caught his breath in the meantime.  “Would you be so kind as to take a message to your mother?”

“Mama said I’m not s’posed to talk to strangers,” she droned.  “Are you a stranger, mister?”

Something was bothering Macy, and she she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.  Something about this situation seemed off, like it was supposed to go down differently.  Not for the first time, she felt the warming metal of the two-dollar piece in her hand, thumbing the engraved mottos on either side of the coin.   _Nächstenliebe ist Mut_ , _Frieden ist Erlösung_.  The words… words… something about words.

“I may be a stranger to you,” implored the duke, “but not to your mother!  The one who is ruler of the Candy Kingdom, that is. I went with her to the battleground of the Gum War!”

“You mean the War that Never Was?” she asked innocently.

“Yes, yes.  Now, would you please take my message to the Princess Regnant?”

“To the Princess Ray-Nant,” she echoed clumsily.  A beat. “Oh, you mean to mother!” On the word ‘mother’, her speech temporarily became much more precise.

That must be it, Macy thought.  Princess Torte talked like someone much younger than she actually was.  Though twelve, she talked — and acted — as if she were six. But why?

“Yes, to your mother,” repeated the duke.  “Can you do that?”

“Hmm, I’unno.”  She gazed thoughtfully into the distance.  It was an exaggerated gesture, the kind Macy knew well.  She recognized the drawn-out, self-parodying motions of a child playing at something else, although she wouldn’t characterize her own such actions that way — her recognition came not from self-awareness but from seeing that behavior in others, mostly her good friend Masse Yvoire.   _Is that it?  Is she pretending to be young the way Masse sometimes pretends to be old?_  But what reason would she have to do that?

“Please, Princess.”  The desperation Macy had noticed in the duke’s voice back in the garden had returned.  “I have been a loyal vassal for years. You can verify that with your mother if you wish.  Please do not be so harsh.”

 _Harsh._  That word rang familiar in Masse’s ears.  She, too, had thought of the treatment the Duke of Nuts received at the hands of Banana Guard Sixteen to be harsh.  Whatever his offence had been, if it were so minor as to not be punishable by more severe means, and if it truly had been eleven years — longer than Macy could even remember — since he had last done it, certainly there were grounds for lenience, if not absolution.

“Well, I dunno,” cooed the little princess, and now that Macy was primed for it, she could easily hear the artificiality in that childish lilt.  It was so clearly a deliberate affectation that she couldn’t imagine how anyone could be fooled by it, least of all herself from ten seconds ago.

“Whadda you guys think?” asked Princess Torte, making her cutest face.  “Should I trust him?”

“Yes,” replied all three of the other guests in perfect unison.  Then they looked at each other, eyes wide with shock, spooked by the unplanned chorus

“No,” said both the banana guards.  Masse jumped in with his own “no,” followed by an “aw, wait, geez,” when he realized he was a half second too late to be in unison.  He seemed disproportionately disappointed.

“Well?”  She turned to Macy, the only one left.  “I must follow the will of the people.” And in that moment everything made sense.

Before she could respond, Masse pulled her to the side, behind a thick-trunked tree from which some manner of chocolate version of a coconut, if only there were a name for such a thing.  The red Morrow-sized eagle perched atop it, eyeing the scene with a scornful scowl.

“I know what you’re going to say.”  Masse’s characteristic intensity changed into something like authority, as if he were imparting some wisdom that Macy had better take for her own good.  “Don’t. Whatever else he might be, this guy’s trouble. He’s a serial offender.”

“But of what!?” cried Macy; suddenly she became intensely aware of her surroundings, and hushed herself.  “We don’t even know what he did!” She grabbed Masse by the shoulder and pulled him even closer, so she could talk yet quieter without sacrificing audibility.  “Besides, even if he isn’t my father, he’s the Duke of Nuts. If we help him, he might be able to track down who my actual parents were.”

“Why.”  It wasn’t delivered as a question, and he wasn’t expecting a response.  Macy knew, on some level, that he was right; learning about her parentage wouldn’t really tell her anything _meaningful_ about herself.  Still, she resented him for making her confront that so bluntly.  What right did he have to speak to her that way?

“I’m an orphan too,” he continued, in that same hollow monotone.

She pushed him away and turned her head down and to the side, studying the roots of the cocoanut tree.  There were visible speckles in the dirt left over from when it was last fed and fertilized. This tree did not grow naturally here; it had to be tended carefully or it would be starved out by its alien environment.  Already some of the roots were poking out of the ground, as if recoiling in disgust at the putrid taste of the undersoil. Within a few decades — short for a tree of its size — it would be replaced with a new one. Macy did not know any of this, yet on some level, she understood it just the same.

“You’re not a nut.”

Macy couldn’t see Masse take three slow steps back.  She didn’t hear his footfalls as he sprinted back to the entrance to the castle proper and then all the way back to the mess hall.  And there was no possible way she could have known she wouldn’t see or hear him again for over a year. All she knew was that, by the time she turned around, she had lost him.

* * *

 “Alright guys, I’m back.”  Jake stretched back into his seat butt-first, scooching Robin off; she curled on the floor between him and Finn, eyeing Jake's magnificent stretchy powers with envy.

“욕실에서 즐거운 시간을 보냈습니까?” asked Lady, one brow cocked.  Jake giggled slowly and awkwardly, blushing.

“You were gone a long time,” noted Finn.  “We were about to send out a search party.”

“Oh, is he back?” asked Dr. Campbell from Finn’s arm monitor.  “I’ll notify Squadron Strong to stand down.”

“Mom, we weren’t actually organizing a search party.”

“Son, I’m a computer program now.  I have trouble distinguishing tone.”

“Yeah, me too,” Robin chimed in.

Everyone looked at zhir, and zhe blushed.  “I meant the tone thing, not— nevermind.” She flashed her horn and projected light patterns over her body, rapidly cycling through color patterns to calm herself down.

“당신이 색 변경 기술을 가지고 있기 때문에,” commented Lady, “당신은 다가오는 Cameladabalawabapp 토너먼트의 훌륭한 파트너가 될 것입니다.”

“Oh this?”  Robin changed zhir coat once more to demonstrate, then stopped.  “I just do that sometimes when I’m stressed. It’s nothing impressive; I can barely affect anything beside myself.”

“그런 문제는 종종 기술 부족으로 인한 것이 아닙니다. 로빈, 너 자신에 대한 더 많은 자신감이 필요해. 크리스털 디멘션 (Crystal Dimension)에있는 우리집을 방문하면 내 비밀 기법을 가르쳐 줄 것입니다. 나는 할아버지에게 가르쳐 봤지만 - 나는 그를 사랑해.하지만 나는 인정해야한다. 그는 너무 나빠서 토마토를 붉게 할 수 없었다.”

Robin snorted.  “Grandnanny, you can’t just _say_ that!”

“It’s kinda true though,” confirmed Jake.

“I’ve never met him in person,” added Dr. Campbell, “but that sounds believable based on what I’ve been told of him.”

Finn crossed his arms and sulked.  “Why am I the only person here who doesn’t understand Korean?”

“It’s because you never learned,” jabbed Jake, his mouth full of his fifth serving of spaghetti as he beckoned a waiter over for sixths.

“Neither did you.”  Robin nodded at Jake’s plate as the waiter scooped another lump of noodles onto it.  “You’re going to need to visit the little pup’s room again by the time the night is over.”

“And it’ll be worth it.”

“당신은 너무 쉽게 무의미한 것에 산만합니다,” Lady chided, clicking her tongue.  “그 때문에 당신은 너무 짧은 시간을 걸립니다—”

Suddenly, Robin shot straight up, hitting zhir head on one of the yellow trusses that supported the vaulted ceiling of the mess hall.  “Oh my glob!” zhe exclaimed, rubbing zhir temple as zhe shrunk zhirself down to the more manageable proportions of zhir poppoppop. “I’ve let myself get so distracted I forgot about my friends!”

She slinked under the table and back to Princess Cookie.  “Where are they?” zhe demanded, shaking Princeso frantically.  Zhir pelt was rapidly oscillating through various color schemes and patterns.  One of the orphans stared too long and began foaming whipped cream at the mouth.

“I~~~ do~~~n’t kno~~~w,” warbled Princess Cookie.  When Robin finally stopped shaking him, he took a moment to adjust his crown.  “I sent Chipolina after them,” he explained as he tended to the epileptic child.  “But she’s with Masse, and those two are always fine when they’re together. They’re tough kids.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”  Robin was not fooled by zhir own conciliatory tone.  Macy had been distracted tonight; she could easily worry herself into a frenzy, and for all his good qualities, Masse lacked tact.  “Still, do you know where they went?”

“Let me ask Chipolina,” he said, pulling a walkie-talkie out of his pocket.

He didn’t get a chance to use it, however, for at that exact moment Masse and Chipolina came back into the mess hall.  Masse looked bitter, staring at his feet as he walked as if he didn’t trust each one to go in front of the other without tripping him.  Chipolina was, as always, chipper.

“Where’s Macy!?” asked Robin and Princeso simultaneously in a panic.

“I blew it,” was all Masse muttered in response.

“She’s at the chocolate aviary,” replied Chipolina, not reading the mood.  “I can take you—”

“No need!” shouted Princess Cookie as he ran off, leading Robin by the hand.  “I’ve been to the castle before too? Take care of the kids while I’m gone.” The rest of the chips jumped out of their holes and ran over to the table.  “Come on! We don’t have much time!”

“Why not?”  Despite zhir prior panic, Robin was not sure where Macy’s caretaker’s urgency came from.

“Macy is… complicated,” huffed Princess Cookie, limping on his bad leg.  “She can’t be left alone or she’ll freeze up. She’s improved since you’ve started hanging around, but obviously you’ve never been with her when she’s alone, since that would be a contradiction.”

Robin glanced to zhir left, as if wondering how zhe didn’t know something so basic about zhir friend, and then morphed into a walking cane so Princeso in his hurry wouldn’t worsen his leg injury any more than he already had.

* * *

Macy had frozen up.

She was still standing under the cocoanut tree, beneath the disapproving glare of the red chocolate eagle, staring at the spot where one of her two favorite people had been standing moments before.  Images flashed through her head — all the time they’d spent together, or at least the version of that time that persisted in her memory, warped by joy and sorrow and now further warped by the stress of this moment which seemed to last an eternity.  She had not merely lost something but destroyed it in a moment of weakness. A sharp pain shot through her chest; she sank to her knees and sunk her hands into the soil. It was sun-warmed and bitter. This patch of soil would be her new home, she decided.

“Um, are you okay?”  She didn’t look up toward the soothing voice of Princess Torte.  Gone was the affectation of childishness. Perhaps she felt the need to put on a different face for Macy, destroyer of worlds.  Perhaps she was simply too shocked at Macy’s indiscretion to remember to keep it up. Who could say for sure? No one.

“I’m fine,” Macy creaked.

When she felt Torte’s soft arm under her shoulder, heaving her upright, she didn’t resist, but she didn’t play along, either.  She was a weathervane, turning in the wind, for everything else was ruination.

“No, you’re _not_ fine,” insisted the young princess.  “You’re having a panic attack. Come on, let’s get you back to your folks.”

“Don’t have folks.”  Macy didn’t know where she found the strength to say even that much.  “Orphan. Nobody… cares about me. Not anymore.”

“Oh, come now.   _I_ care about you.”  She said it with the mixture of pomp and sincerity characteristic of someone who saw it as their duty to care about everyone and truly believed they did so.

“Prove it.”

“Well…”  It was an impossible demand, of course, to make of a stranger, so it was no surprise Princess Torte did not answer immediately; Macy was surprised she was trying at all.  Her intent had been to drive the princess away, because repelling people who claimed to care about her was apparently all she was good for.

“I value your opinion.”

The princess’s answer was unexpected, shocking Macy out of her reverie.  The world was still spinning, trying to throw her off balance, but this bizarre statement demanded her investigation.  She steadied herself against the thick trunk of the cocoanut tree. “What about?”

“This man.”  She gestured to the duke, still watching outside, concern on his face.  “Should I take his message, or no?”

The question was obviously not the issue here, Macy knew.  Before, the princess had been asking for the popular consensus on what to do because she had known already what that consensus would have been — had read the room — and wanted to obfuscate her wisdom so people wouldn’t treat her like an adult.  That was what Macy had realized: that the princess’s pretense of immaturity was so people wouldn’t prejudge her in the opposite direction. Now, however, she wanted Macy’s opinion because she wanted Macy to be wanted. It was an obvious gesture, but Macy appreciated it anyway.

Her head began to clear somewhat.  Out of a desire to do something — anything — right, she resolved to give the princess the best possible answer.  But what _was_ that?  Macy herself, in the princess’s shoes, would have undoubtedly trusted this stranger; that, she knew, was not a good reason.  Masse, whom she had been so rude to, had had a point; besides, even if the duke’s offense couldn’t have been too major, the fact that Princess Bubblegum still held a grudge after eleven years meant it couldn’t have been too minor, either.

She was about to tell Princess Torte to turn the duke away when she suddenly remembered something.  She whirled around, nearly tripping, and saw it lying in the dirt: her toonie, half-sunken into the soil, where she had dropped it after going into that mini panic attack.  She knelt over and picked it up, licking her thumb to wipe off the dirt covering the inscriptions. _Nächstenliebe ist Mut , _Frieden ist Erlösung_ .  Charity is courage, peace is salvation.  Jake had told her that these messages would be important.  She figured they might provide some guidance now, but _how?__

__

Then she thought of Colonel Candy Corn.  He seemed to be so against peace, from what 16 had told her.  And he talked so unkindly about the duke, so… uncharitably. Did that say something about the duke, or about the Colonel?  She suspected the latter.

But if the Colonel could be so flawed, and if he could still hold such a high station despite that, what did that imply about Princess Bubblegum?  What did it imply about _her_ peace, _her_ charity?

“Take his message,” insisted Macy, and from the look in Princess Torte’s eyes, she could tell she had chosen the correct answer, or at the very least the answer the princess believed to be correct.  Macy was not yet recovered enough to contemplate the difference between those two things, and she probably wouldn’t be until it was too late for such distinctions to matter.

“Very—” started the princess; when she spoke again, her cutesy lilt was back.  “Okay, miss. Bananana Guard Numbah two zero one eight, open the gate.”

The guard obliged, apparently having already forgotten whatever reservations she had maintained about the duke only moments prior.  The duke, for his part, seemed wowed by the princess’s generosity; he took a cautious step inside, as if unsure whether the ground in front of him were real.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” he said, awestruck.

As Princess Torte led Macadamia and the Duke of Nuts back through the aviary to the entrance that would lead them to the great mess hall, in preparation for the second half of the day’s festivities, who should emerge but Princess Cookie and Robin.  Princeso curtsied for the young princess of the Candy Kingdom, while Robin leapt forward, abandoning zhir prior form, and hugged Macy, knocking her off her feet. Princess Torte’s onlookers let out a collective sigh of cuteness-admiration, and Macy was suddenly uncomfortable with their presence.

“Are you okay are you okay are you okay are you okay are you okay,” panted Robin.

Macy pushed the rainicorn-dog away from her, standing up the front half-meter of zhir body so that the rest trailed behind her back to where Princess Cookie stood.  “I’m fine,” she assured her, a slight chuckle in her voice. It was almost true, too.

The duke cleared his throat and addressed Princeso.  “Pardon me, sir, but you are Princess Cookie, are you not?  We met once before, about eleven and a half years ago.”

Macy gasped and looked to the duke, then Princeso, then back again.  Something was happening. Her pericarp tingled with the static of a thousand candyfloss sweaters.

“I remember everyone who visits my doorstep,” said Princeso, his voice low and serious.  “You brought this one.”

He gestured to Macy, who felt a sudden tightness in her chest.  It felt like another panic attack had threatened to come on but her emotions were so raw from the last one that it decided not to bother.

“Yes,” confirmed the duke.  “Her parents had been lost in the great earthquake, and we did not have our own orphanage, so I brought her here.  I knew that you would take good care of her.”

“And I have.”  Princeso raised his eyebrow.  “What are you getting at, old man?”

“I realize now that I made a mistake.”  He knelt down to look Macy in the eyes, and when she stared back, she saw her own reflection.  In the distorting convex mirror of his eyes, it looked like something small pretending to be something big.  She couldn’t help but pity it.

“You were one of my subjects,” he continued.  “So it should have been my responsibility as a leader to make sure you were cared for, not to pass it off to someone else.  However noble my intentions were, I sent you away, and for that I am sorry.”

“Is this going where I think it’s going?” inquired Princeso.  His eyebrow was now threatening to escape his face entirely and enter near-cookie orbit, or possibly become his newest chip

“Yes, it is.”  He picked Macy up.  “I would like to adopt this child.”

“Yes!” exclaimed Macy and gave him a peck on the cheek.  Through the brown of his shell, she could see him blush.

* * *

Masse and the other orphans followed Chipolina outside.  Some of the guests hadn’t arrived back yet, but Lolly had said that they needed to hurry up this reveal before it started to rain.  They filed in a large ring by the castle’s outer courtyard, where a modest stage often played host to city events which didn’t require specialized setup.  A large, amorphous object was situated on the stage, covered in a brown tarp; Slime Princess was taking selfies in front of it, seemingly under the impression that it was the tarp which was the second tribute to Betty and Fern.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” announced Princess Bubblegum, speaking into that microphone made of pistachio ice cream.  “May I present to you this statue—”

—she pulled the tarp down in one surprisingly swift motion, revealing a large rectangular object with various images sticking out of it like a pop-up book—

“—of the new official Ooo calendar, ratified by all 167 heads of state!  Welcome to Year 30!”

As an overblown horn production hailed the rain of confetti from unseen rafters, Masse turned to Chipolina, shaking his head and clucking.  “Well, that’s a bit of an anticlimax.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap on the first chapter! Going by word count, this is less of a chapter and more of a novelette, if not a short novella; that's partly by design, since each chapter is _intended_ to also have its own semi-complete story (more like an episode of a TV show than a chapter of a novel), and partly a result of my haphazard writing style.
> 
> While the work as a whole is planned out far in advance, many devices within the chapter were developed as it was written. I don't think this is a problem; I still managed to hit all the points I wanted to, and by not having too much structure laid out ahead of time, I allowed the character traits that I emerged as I wrote guide the progression of the plot. That does mean that the update schedule and especially the chapter length has the potential to be wildly inconsistent, but I think that's a worthwhile trade-off.
> 
> There were several changes between the original idea for this storyline and the final product, some of which I won't be able to discuss for years, but one that I feel comfortable admitting is Princess Torte. In my original vision for Half Past Adventure, I wasn't even sure if Bubblegum and Marceline _had_ any children other than The-Candy-Formerly-Known-As-Peppermint-Butler; I added Princess Torte because I wanted them to have a child who was the same age as the main character, mostly because the Candy Castle seemed empty without one, despite the extended family that resides there.
> 
> And if you think that means Princess Torte won't be important going forward, you're underestimating how much I'm willing to uproot my existing plans in order to justify a spur-of-the-moment decision. I've made bigger changes to the plans for the series based on less just during the drafting of the first scene. While I do have some specific scenes mapped out for later in the story, for the most part I've left things open enough to admit whatever spontaneous characterization I feel suits the story best.
> 
> By the time I've posted this, I should have at the very least started on the next chapter; the goal is for me to eventually be a full chapter ahead at all times. With that in mind, be patient if the update schedule is a little rocky at first; as I said, I'm not really sure how long these chapters are going to go.
> 
> Lastly, here's the promised excerpt from the next chapter, to be titled “The Case of the Purloined Pudding”:
> 
> Cash cocked her eyebrow like she was loading a pistol of incredulity, preparing to fire straight through the heart of darkness that shrouded the million unanswered questions plaguing the world of criminality. She’d been asked to help out on other peoples’ cases numerous times before, but this was by far the most childish way of phrasing it she’d ever heard. It intrigued her, this impossible innocence, maintained even in the face of the ugliness of the world. That innocence was bound to be snuffed out someday soon, but Cash wasn’t yet heartless enough to do it.


	2. The Case of the Purloined Pudding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Macy and Robin must solve a mystery before the mysterious pudding bandit gets away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel obliged to mention up front that this chapter is very different from the last one in theme and tone. If you were expecting immediate follow-up on everything that was laid down in the previous chapter, you don't know what long-form means.
> 
> This story is going to skip over some stuff in between the end of the last episode and the beginning of this one. If it bothers you, just assume that the Duke of Nuts went through a whole complicated adoption process and this is actually two months later or something; that'll work fine up until I actually give a date. I do intend to do that at some point (that's why I invented a calendar), but it's not a spoiler to say I won't do it in this chapter; I don't want to chronologize myself into a corner. I might have Macy age in semi-real time, like Finn did, but that could make her 30 by the time the story ends, so maybe not. Not that I have a problem with thirty-year-olds, but that's just not the story I want to write at this time — although by the time that comes around it might be.
> 
> And that's not _that_ much of an exaggeration; I do know how the story will end (as of the day after posting the first chapter), and if I come out with a chapter every three weeks and stick to 18 chapters a season, it'll take somewhere from nine-and-a-half to twelve-and-a-half years to get there. All of which assumes I keep a consistent schedule with no breaks, which I seriously doubt will happen, if for no other reason than breaks are nice.

“And… unpacked.”

Macy put the single book —  _ A Collector’s Guide to Coinage, Volume 47 _ by Lionel Rednose — on the otherwise-empty shelf, then rested her hands on the side of her body, imitating a sitcom-esque hans-on-hips posture to the greatest extent her elliptical nut body would allow..  Now this place really felt like home.

Robin, who had shifted into a dark brown backpack, reverted to zhir original shape and coloration as zhe dumped the rest of zhir and Robin’s supplies unceremoniously on the bed.  There were mostly simple, serviceable clothes — a sparse collection, since neither candy people nor rainicorn-dogs usually needed clothing — and basic hygiene utensils, some of whose purposes would be so alien to a human and thus whose appearances aren’t worth describing.  There were also some gifts that Princess Cookie and the rest of the orphans had sent with them: a few half-completed arts & crafts projects, a letter from Masse that Macy wasn’t ready to open, and even a camera phone Princess Cookie had bought for Macy. He had offered to give Robin one, too, but zhe declined, claiming that zhe preferred prismgrams, that strange piece of magical communication technology that required rainicorn magic (or a similar substitute) to operate.  In truth, Macy had never actually seen Robin send _or_ receive a prismgram, and she suspected that zhe simply didn’t want to be made the center of attention.

“I’ll take your word for it,” droned Robin as zhe got back to zhir full seven-and-a-half-meter length.  In most rooms, Robin would not be able to comfortably extend to zhir full size; it was a very numbing, claustrophobic feeling unique to shapeshifters, like one’s limbs being made to squeeze flush against one’s body at all times.  Macy’s new bedroom, however, was a renovated guest suite in Castle Jugland, the grand seat of power for the Duchy of Nuts. The interior of the room was green, in contrast with the plain brown exterior of the castle; red accents dominated the floral carpet, the wall trusses, the chandelier, even the ornamented windows.  There was a large bookcase against one wall, a larger bed against the other, and on the wall between, a writing desk out of whose window could be seen the forested valley that separated the Duchy from the center of the Candy Kingdom. Robin took a moment to glance out the window, taking in the landscape. Zhe had been in this forest before, but zhe had never gotten the chance to see it from above.  It made zhir feel insignificant in a comforting way, like zhe were being let off the hook from responsibility.

“You know, I’m sure Dad’s offer still stands.”  It was curious how quickly Macy had taken to calling him ‘dad’.  She’d only met the Duke of Nuts two days ago, barring the time he had dropped her off on the doorstep of the Candy Orphanage as a baby, yet the term had slipped into a vocabulary like a hand into a fitted glove.  “And looking at the size of this room, there’s definitely enough room to add an extra bed that can accommodate your length.”

“Nah.”  Robin pressed zhir paw against the window, zhir toelike fingers flattening against the glass crisp and cool in the spring morning air.  “Civilization’s not really my scene. I’ll hang out with you like always, but I just don’t feel at home sleeping under a roof.”

“Yeah, why is that?”  Macy grabbed a wire hanger from the large walk-in closet and took it over to the bet where Robin had dumped her wardrobe.  “You’d spend all day in the city with me and Masse at the orphanage but then head out to the candy forest at night.”

“Doesn’t need to be a reason.”  Robin pulled zhir paw away, leaving a smudge on the glass.  Zhe zapped the smudge with a beam from zhir horn, making it invisible — at least until zhir magic wore off.

Macy held up a shirt in one hand and the hanger in the other, examining them curiously.  At the orphanage her only closet space had been half a drawer; the Candy Orphanage hadn’t been underfunded, but it wasn’t luxurious, either, and often that meant practicality had to come before comfort.  That was one of the things Macy had begun to realize only shortly before getting adopted. Of course she had loved Princess Cookie, but after all those years she hadn’t quite loved him like a father, yet she formed that connection with the Duke so quickly.  Perhaps it was because Princeso’s love had been undifferentiated, whereas the Duke’s was personal. Was it selfish to love a love that was selective more than one that was unconditional? She didn’t care to think about that question, so she did not. Questioning things like that could drive a person mad.

Sensing a hole in the conversion, Robin continued speaking.  “But man, can you believe the reason the Duke had been banned from the castle?  And Princess Bubblegum _still_ wouldn’t lift the ban!  Oh, man, she was furious.”

“I know, right?”  Macy had done such a poor job of putting the shirt on the hanger that someone looking at it would have a hard time determining that it was a shirt, or even that it rested on a hanger.  “‘Eating all the pudding in the royal vault’ isn’t the kind of crime you’d expect someone to refuse to forgive for eleven years.”

“Plus, if he’s taking Dr. Minerva’s supplements to counteract his pudding deficiency, that shouldn’t even be a problem anymore.”

“Yeah,” agreed Macy, picking up another shirt and slipping it onto the bundle of cloth and wire in her hand.  “I just hope she wasn’t too hard on her daughter; she was only trying to help.”

“Eh, what’s up with that, by the way?”  Robin uncurled zhir body so it sat in a ring parallel to the floor, making an impromptu corral around Macy as she grabbed another hanger to support the growing cluster.  “You’ve been asking about Princess Torte more than about Masse Yvoire, and you’ve barely said anything about what went on after you left the party. Masse hasn’t been talking, either, and the two of you wouldn’t go _near_ each other.”  Zhe stretched a paw over to Macy and rested it on her shoulder; when she turned, zhe stared into Macy’s eyes with her own crystal peepers, willing a million unspeakable words into that glittering gaze.  “I’m worried about you, Macy.”

“I’m… I’ll be fine.”  Macy turned her attention to the clothing clog.  It was now comprised of eight shirts, two dresses, one pair of pants, and enough distorted wire hangers to make a kabbalist golem, hypothetically speaking.  To know the shape of it would be to understand principles beyond the grasp of any twenty-first-century mathematician, beyond all existing notions of topology and graph theory and non-Euclidean spaces.  It was beautiful and hideous all at once. She gazed into it, transfixed, letting whatever she would have said next die in her throat; and as she stared, it seemed to stare back. If consciousness is born of complexity, then that bundle was a being beyond even the divine.

Then it fell apart.

“You know what would cheer you up?” asked Robin, grabbing the loose clothes without bothering to sift out the hangers and dumping them unfolded into a drawer in the walk-in closet.

“Don’t say exploring the castle.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Robin lied.

“Then what were you going to say?”

“…pudding?”

Macy rested one hand on the bet behind her as she addressed Robin, one brow cocked.  “Why pudding?”

“I’ve got it on the mind.”  Zhe contracted zhirself to a much smaller size for ease of navigation.  “Come on, let’s go find the castle’s pudding vault!”

“You don’t know that that’s something this castle has,” noted Macy as they walked out of her new bedroom, the rest of her belongings still strewn about haphazardly because for the first time they could afford to be.

“Not with that attitude it doesn’t!”

* * *

The good news was that the castle did, in fact, have a pudding vault.  The butler Lisby, who spoke in a comical, perpetually-excited tone that didn’t seem reflective of his rank as chief of the castle staff, was more than happy to point Macy and Robin in its direction.  The vault was to be stocked at all times, and anyone was free to partake of it, so long as they did not take too much; after all, even with his supplements, the Duke’s pudding deficiency still demanded that he have a supply on hand.

The bad news was that it was, impossibly, empty.

The Duke of Nuts was assessing the situation with the captain of the guard.  The duke looked frizz-frazzled: that particular blend of harried and hagrid where the only thing separating person from beast is crippling anxiety.  His dukely robe, woven from a single sheet of fine yellow silk, was beginning to tear already as he tugged at it nervously; his magnificent purple hat was on the floor.  The captain of the guard, in contrast, gave off an aura of stoicism in her green uniform, one hand resting leisurely on the hilt of her sickle, the other clasped hard on the duke’s shoulder.  The duke’s eldest son, the Marquess Penhaligon, was also present, pacing nervously; he wore a long black wig which obscured much of his body front and back like a veil, swishing gently as he quickly paced back and forth.

“Sir The Duke, we’ll get to the bottom of this,” the guard captain was promising as Macy and Robin got within earshot.  “We’ve already sent for the guards who were on duty, and we’ll put the best investigator on the force in charge of the investigation.”

Penhaligon stopped his pacing and whirled around to face the guard captain.  On anyone else, the motion would indicate a sense of sharp anger or excitement, but for a nut, it was simply the only way to turn one’s field of vision outside the small forty-five-degree arc their centralized bodies could muster.  Whenever Macy had done this, the candy people who surrounded her would act startled, wondering who had said something to offend her, so she had trained herself out of it. Nobody here had that reaction when her new brother Penhaligon did it, which relieved a tension Macy hadn’t realized she was holding.

“What about the best investigator _not_ on the force?” demanded Penhaligon in an accusatory tone.

The guard captain was unstirred by this.  “I beg your pardon, Marquess, but the Gabon Guard is perfectly capable of handling its own investigations.  There is no need to bring an outsider into the confidence of the guard just to solve a theft, no matter its scale.”

“Hey Dad, hey Pen, what’s going—” started Macy, then stopped when everyone stared at her — the guard captain with suspicion, her dad with worry, her brother with startlement, and Robin with an anxiety bordering on panic.  “…is it something I said?”

“Oh, no!” exclaimed the duke, rushing over to hug his new daughter.  “Oh, no, sweetie, you just walked in on a difficult, adult conversation.”  He stepped away to resume his frizz-frazzling. “Nothing you should concern your—”

“—the pudding vaults were emptied,” interjected Robin.  “I heard you discussing it as we approached.”

“Yes, and we need to put the very best in charge of finding the culprit,” insisted Penhaligon.  Up close, Macy was reminded that his face was actually on the bottom half of his body, not the top.  She stifled a giggle. Despite his height, her brother had to always look up when talking to just about anyone; she suspected he hadn’t gained an inch since he was younger than she.

“You are out of line, Marquess.”  The guard captain stepped forward, directly into the Penhaligon’s face, her hand now firmly gripping the handle of her sickle.  The duke, in his frizz-frazzled state, did not appear to notice the implied threat. “You will not interfere with the way this investigation is conducted, understood?”

Penhaligon smirked behind his long black toupé.  “Macy, right?” he called over his shoulder.

“Yes?”

“You want to learn to be a hero, right?”

“Yeah!”

“Well, there’s a private investigator in the city who’s really good at solving crimes.  If she helped you solve this one, you’d be super heroic.”

The duke looked at Macy, excitement in his eyes.  “Oh yes, Cash Daniels! I’ll give you her address; with— with her help, you’ll solve the case for sure!”

“Aw yeah!” exclaimed Macy, high-fiving Robin several times in a row.  “We get to solve a mystery and help out our dad!”

The guard captain backed down, her weapon hand now relaxed.  “Very well,” she said stiffly; “you kids go have fun with the detective while us guards track down the pudding thief.”  She failed to keep the desperation out of her voice in the latter half of that sentence.

“Come on!”  Robin was already bounding down the hall.  “Last one there is… uh… the last one to get there!”

Macy, on the other hand, waited for her dad to hand her a business card that held the address to Cash Daniels’s office, because she played to win.

* * *

Cash Daniels, P.I., was one of the top consulting detectives in the candy kingdom.  Solicitations for her services were numerous in quantity; compensation, adequate. It was a balmy spring noon.  She was feeling particularly hard-boiled today.

At that moment the Duke’s new kid stepped into her office.  She was a real hard-shell type, the kind of kid who thinks she’s seen it all because she’s read it in a book.  From the way she walked, it was obvious she couldn’t contain her excitement. Clearly, whatever was going down at the castle to necessitate sending the Duke’s youngest daughter out to meet her, nobody had met their maker yet.

“Excuse me,” she said, sticking her hand out across the smooth mahogany desk, “are you Cash Daniels?”  She asked this even though she clearly already knew the answer, as if she were aware of the possibility that everything around her was some sort of flimsy fabrication that would come tumbling down if she interrogated it too closely and she just wanted to get it over with.

“Sure is,” replied the P.I., shaking the new marquess’s hand quickly.  She didn’t like long handshakes; anyone who let a handshake last longer than a second either wanted something from you or was willing to give it, and Cash had no time for either solicitation or obsequity.  “What can I do ya for?”

“I’d like your help to solve a mystery.”

Cash cocked her eyebrow like she was loading a pistol of incredulity, preparing to fire straight through the heart of darkness that shrouded the million unanswered questions plaguing the world of criminality.  She’d been asked to help out on other peoples’ cases numerous times before, but this was by far the most childish way of phrasing it she’d ever heard. It intrigued her, this impossible innocence, maintained even in the face of the ugliness of the world.  That innocence was bound to be snuffed out someday soon, but Cash wasn’t yet heartless enough to do it.

“What kind of mystery?” she probed, taking a long drag from the pixie stick in her mouth.  She knew that much sugar wasn’t good for you — rotted your teeth — but she didn’t mind; the world was as cruel as any dentist.  In her world, you were either the dentist or the tooth. The tooth rot was the criminal underbelly of Ooo, and if you wanted to catch a tooth rot, you had to eat some sugar.

“The royal pudding vault has been emptied!”

Sounded like someone was going to eat a lot of sugar.  Only villains did that.

“When was this?”

“I think it wasn’t more than an hour ago.”

“Right, then,” she said, bolting upright out of her sleek black chair.  It was as black as her sole, scuffed with tar from the city streets and dirt from the mountain roads.  “I’ve got fingers in the black markets; I doubt whoever did this will be foolish enough to try to sell it immediately, but they can’t exactly keep it in town or try to smuggle it out on their own.  We should be able to find some manner of lead.”

“I thought you would want to check out the crime scene.”  The marquess tilted her head in confusion, looking like a lost child, or possibly a child who was standing in one of those fun houses where everything’s tilted to the side to give your brain the illusion of imbalance.  Sometimes life was like a funhouse, except not as fun, and not a house.

Cash laughed, a single, hollow laugh that rang with misery rather than merriment.  “The castle guards’ll be swarming there; they’ll end up getting in the way. We can ask them for collaboration if and when we need it.  Come on.” She strode out the door, the marquess trailing behind her like a puppy that was excited to solve a mystery.

As she left the musty old office building she worked out of, she saw an unmistakable figure bounding down the street — the marquess’s friend, that unicorn-dog with the black jowls.  Zhe was a real drifter type; she could see it in zhir storied, drifting eyes. There was a person who would never be happy in the same place as yesterday. If zhe kept bounding around Ooo the way zhe bounded down the street, zhe was liable to knock something over, and then it would be Cash’s job to bring zhir to justice.  That was the way of the world, after all.

“Hey, I finally figured out— oh, come on!” exclaimed the rainicorn-dog, zhir ruby eyes catching the glint of the midday sun as zhe skidded to an unceremonious halt in front of Cash and her apparent self-proclaimed protege.  “Aw man, you never beat me anywhere!”

The marquess stuck her tongue out and blew a raspberry, the discordant notes reflecting the meaningless chaos of the world she was about to enter.  Cash led them on into the heart of darkness, holding back a single tear for the innocence which would soon be lost to this cruel, unforgiving world.

* * *

“Here it is,” muttered Cash, in that tone that was at once understated and melodramatic.  “The most wretched grove of scum and villainy this side of the Mystery Mountains.” When she talked like that, Macy found it impossible to take her seriously.  She was beginning to regret bringing the detective along.

‘Villainous’ was not the first word that would occur to Macy were she tasked with describing the bar she, Cash, and Robin now entered, with its cheery lighting, abstract artwork, and patron dressed in all manner of eye-hurting colors.  If she were being generous, she might describe it as ‘seedy’, but only in the sense that one would describe a tree branch as ‘sticky’. Behind the bar, a sunflower was mixing root beer and cherry cream cola for a particularly daring customer.

“Keep quiet,” continued Cash, leading Macy and Robin toward the open seats at the back of the bar.  “Don’t attract any attention to yourself. Unfamiliar faces mean fresh marks for these pusillanimous reprobates.”  Macy was not sure those were all words.

As Macy climbed onto her seat and Robin shrank onto zhirs, the sunflower, having finished mixing the drink, sauntered over to Cash.  “It’s been too long, my friend,” they said in a gravely voice, reaching one leaf out to bump Cash’s outstretched fist as another rinsed out the cocktail shaker and a third wrapped around some top-shelf soda.

“Not long enough, Helix,” replied Cash gravely.  The two shared a short laugh, like they had just exchanged a private joke that wasn’t all that funny.  “How’s business?”

“Business is business.  Had a bit of a surge last week from a traveling caravan of Icy University gradjit students.”  They set the bottle on the counter behind the bar and reached for another. “Poor rubes thought they was gettin’ their money’s worth.”

“Hear anything interesting?”

Helix eyed Macy and Robin suspiciously in turn as they reached for a third container, this one containing chocolate syrup.  “Gossip’s rude, Cash. Y’should know better than that.”

Cash reached into her pocket and pulled out a small vermillion pouch, sliding it across the bar nonchalantly; Macy tried to get a peek at what was inside, but Helix deliberately opened it in such a way that she couldn’t.

Suddenly she felt a tap on the shoulder opposite cash; when she turned around, she saw Robin standing there, squished down to about half Macy’s height; zhe had apparently stretched out of zhir seat so as not to make a sound.  “This is taking too long,” zhe whispered; “let’s go do our own thing.”

Being twelve, Macy found this a fine idea.  She and Robin trawled the bar for about ten paces, examining its purportedly prevaricatious patrons, before they realized neither of them had any idea how to investigate anything.

Robin leaned close to Macy.  “I’ve got an idea.” She then whispered a plan into the slit on the side of Macy’s head that acted as an ear.  Macy gave Robin a thumbs up which was covert only because nobody was paying any attention to them, and then Robin got to work.

Zhe transformed into a woolen hat with long tassels for Macy to wear, using zhir horn to turn zhirself a dull shade of green.  Macy went up to one of the bar patrons — a scraggly-bearded karuka with too many belts — and tapped them on the shoulder. “Excuse me, mistah,” she said in her best imitation of Princess Torte pretending to be a little kid, “what’s youw name?”

They grunted.  “Jeff.”

“Chef,” repeated Macy.  “Chef. Ta-yeff.” She pointed at one of his belts, which had a large black bag attached to it like a key on a ring.  “Wuzzat?”

Jeff patted the bag, as if suddenly worried that it might be empty.  “This? Oh, uh, it’s nothing.”

“I have a bag too!”  She held up two fingers as if to demonstrate.  “It’s pink and sparkly and my caretakah at the ophanage gave it to me.  See, one time I was carrying a bunch of papers — the papers were for a project we were making — we were making pictures of Princess Bubblegum cuzza she was gonna visit — she and Princeso…”

Macy continued on and on like this until Jeff fell asleep out of boredom, then a bit further because she was now committed to the bit.  When eventually Robin formed a mouth on one of zhir tassels to let Macy know zhe had finished peeked into Jeff’s dream, Macy was in all earnestness explaining to an unconscious karuka exactly what tricks the lion had performed during a talent show Princeso had taken the orphans to.  (Macy had volunteered to be his assistant, and to this day she had no idea how so many coins had been inside her nonexistent ear.)

“That bag’s got nothing but apples,” whispered Robin.  “This guy’s a bust.”

They repeated this process on a few more customers, each time with a different series of vaguely connected, half-formed anecdotes, but to no avail.  By the time Macy put an entire table to sleep describing every minute detail of an episode of a hypernet cooking show as if it were a classical painting, analyzing it in much more detail than she could accurately recall, Robin had given up on finding anything.

“I guess this wasn’t the best plan after all,” zhe sighed, dejected, as zhe regained.  “Also, it’s pronounced helpernet. You know, like the Helpers.”

“Really?”  Macy patted at her head; the sensation of hatlessness after one removes a hat sometimes felt to her like a hat in its own right, so she needed to ensure there wasn’t actually something else on her head.  “Huh; I’ve been saying it wrong my whole life.” A beat. “I’m not gonna stop, either. I like hypernet better.”

“Yeah; me too, to be honest.”  As Robin re-shrank to fit better on the stool beside Cash, who was so engaged with haggling Helix for information that she didn’t seem to have noticed the two had left, zhe let out another, deeper sigh.  “It’s a shame, though. Especially since _this_ clearly isn’t going anywhere.”

As if on cue, Cash slammed her fist on the table, rattling the glass of almond milk in front of her.  “Math this, Helix, I know you’re holding out on me! If you think you can wring me dry, you’ve got another thing coming.  I can just walk out of here if you’re going to waste my time like this.”

Helix dropped the glass mug they were cleaning into a basin behind the bar with a loud shattering sound and nonchalantly reached for another one.  “Do it then,” they challenged, not even slightly turning their head.

“Playing hardball, eh?”  Cash took out a pixie stick, put one end in her mouth, and lit the other end with a small silver lighter.  “Bold move from someone who doesn’t store their sodas in a regulation refrigerator.”

Helix continued wiping down the mug, but their movements were just a tiny bit faster and more careless than before.  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” they muttered.

“And I don’t know what you’re _not_ talking about, so let’s see which of us gets to remain ignorant.”

“I’m serious, I’ve told you all I can.”  The mug was certainly clean by now but Helix kept wiping it down anyway.  “I don’t know nothing about no pudding theft. There ain’t been no talk like that round here, an’ that’s Glob’s honest truth.”

“They’re right.”  Macy gave the deepest sigh of all.  “I kept spying on the dreams of everyone in the bar, but the only thing anyone seemed interested in buying was apples.”

At that last word Cash snapped to attention.  “You didn’t say anything about apples,” she accused.

“I didn’t think it was relevant.”  Helix’s voice was beginning to crack, along with the mug in their hands.  “You’re a good customer, but I don’t want to risk getting on her bad side if I don’t want to.”

“Her?  Her who?”

“Penelope Farthington.”

Cash cursed under her breath; despite Macy listening closely, she was unable to understand this new and exciting swear word well enough to add it to her vocabulary.

Helix continued, talking much more quickly and quietly than before.  “She’s been gearing up to make a move. Probably aiming for the Eye of Perseus, since it’s the biggest emerald in Ooo that she hasn’t tried to steal yet.  Somehow word got out, and now all the local jewel fences are competing for her attention.”

Cash matched Helix’s lowered, hasty tone in her response.  “And since the Shrine of Perseus is usually pretty heavily guarded, she must have arranged for this theft in order to distract the royal guard!”

Macy raised her hand.  “Um, wouldn’t that mean—”

“Probably.”  Helix set down the mug on the counter and reached over for a soda, but in their frantic state missed; they made the motion of pouring air into the mug, not realizing they weren’t holding anything in their other leaf.  “And you didn’t hear it from me, but the Bramblebush Hotel recently closed off the top floor of the west wing for renovations with no advance warning. They cancelled all reservations for that section up to a couple weeks before renovations are planned to begin and paid the would-be guests triple the usual refund to keep them from makin’ a stink about it.”

Robin began to make a few dancing lights to try to get Cash’s attention but Macy waved zhir down before zhe could draw the attention of anyone else.

“She’s probably planning on auctioning it off within the city,” said Cash, her downturned chin clasped in her fist like a Renaissance sculpture nobody in the Duchy of Nuts could possibly be familiar with.  “The local fences would be much better equipped to deal with the emerald than she is, whether to hide it or relocate it. We’ve got to get over there quickly!”

“Whoa whoa whoa.”  Helix stirred the mug of air friskily.  “You can’t possibly be thinking about confronting Farthington.  I know the two of you have some sort of longstanding rivalry/romance—” Cash opened her mouth in protest, but Helix steamrolled past — “but even you can’t be crazy enough to try to get in her way of a big score like this.  The woman’s ruthless. She has absolutely no ruth. I don’t even know what ruth _is_ , and I’m sure she doesn’t either.”

“Nah.”  Cash took a long drag from her pixie stick.  She couched on a bit of sweetened pixie dust caught in her throat, then resumed talking.  “I’m not interested in the emerald; that’s not my case. I’m only interested in the pudding.”

“Ever the pragmatist.”  Helix slid the empty mug down the bar, where Jeff caught it and began chugging the air inside.  “Hey, before you go, are any o' y’all gonna actually buy a drink?”

* * *

The Bramblebush Hotel loomed over the street below like a titan, fifty balconies reaching out to grasp the city and strangle the life out of it, fifty more on the unseen reverse overlooking the sheer drop into the Valley of Moths as a king overlooks a great feast.  Tourists milled about mindlessly — the rich with their palanquins and covered wagons, the sightseers to whom a sunset over the peaks of the Sienna Ridge was a commodity, the perpetual travelers unmoored from any bedrock — oblivious to the dark doings going on right over their heads.  All the windows on the left side’s fiftieth floor were closed, and there was some equipment visible on the roof above them; it was a pathetic performance at renovation, but nobody bothered to look closely enough to see it. Cash took a deep breath, then pushed on the front doors to the hotel and stepped into the air-conditioned lobby.

“I’m just saying, we probably could have stayed for at least one round of drinks,” said Macy.  “I wanted some ginger ale.”

“Justice doesn’t have time for a round of drinks.”  Cash strolled up to the receptionist with an unbreaking gait.  It was important to show no weakness to these kinds of people, and while the receptionist was probably not one of ‘these kinds’, it always pays to show no weakness anyway.  Showing no weakness was like a muscle, which worked in tandem with the muscle of never hesitating in order to operate the long arm of justice. And it was important to exercise your muscles; otherwise they would atrophy, and then you’d need to take anti-inflammatories.  Cash wasn’t sure what anti-inflammatories were in this analogy, and she didn’t intend to find out.

“Well we’re going back afterward,” declared Macy.  “I want ginger ale.”

“Ring up the top floor of the west wing,” Cash told the receptionist, taking her pixie stick out of her mouth and blowing a puff of smoke that glittered pink, green, and robin’s-egg blue.  “Tell them that Daniels wants to chat.”

“The fiftieth floor is closed for renovations,” said the receptionist in a mechanical, rehearsed tone.

“Do it anyway.”  Cash put the pixie stick back in her mouth and walked away.

As the receptionist performed the absurd-sounding request, Cash took a seat in one of the large, cushy armchairs.  The give of the fabric remind her of… of… she was too comfortable to come up with a hard-boiled analogy about armchairs.  She’d be sure to think of one later before she completed today’s journal entry.

After a few minutes, just as Cash tossed her pixie stick in the garbage, a soft ding announced the opening of the brass elevator doors.  A tall human man with a shiny metal scalp and whirring robotic eye in a dark tuxedo stood inside, a pristine white towel draped over one arm.  He beckoned to Cash with the other. “The mistress will see you now,” he intoned, his voice tinny.

Cash stood up and got into the elevator; Macy and Robin, the poor fools, followed suit.

“Who are these two?” asked the cyborg valet in disgust.

“They’re with me, Izak.”  Cash took out another pixie stick from her side pocket.  “Don’t touch them,” she added before putting it in her mouth and lighting it.

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”  Izak’s face and body gave away nothing as usual, but judging by his voice he sounded offended by the prospect.  Cash would expect nothing less; her rival/romantic partner was a lowlife living the high life, but she wouldn’t hurt a kid, and neither would her partner in crime.

The elevator didn’t lurch upward like other elevators tended to; it smoothly ascended the seeming increase in gravity so gradual that Cash hadn’t even noticed it until it had reached its peak.  She watched the clock hand tick up the floor numbers, the box’s passage through space and time momentarily in perfect harmony, like cogs in a well-oiled machine of some kind renowned for unflagging precision.

A beat.

Robin turned to Cash.  “So, apples were code for stolen gems, right?” zhe inquired.

“Yes,” Cash and Izak replied simultaneously.

A few more moments passed before another soft ding cued the opening of the elevator’s doors into the dimly lit hallway of the top floor of the west wing of the Bramblebush Hotel.

Apparently, even though the renovations were in large part a cover story for a black market auction, the hotel management in their thrift decided to kill two metaphorical birds with one literal, opulent gemstone.  All around them, walls were knocked down; there was fresh paint on half the surfaces, and the air was filled thick with fumes and dust and ozone. Nearby, a carpenter, apparently unfazed the passage of a master thief’s butler and his bizarre entourage, was assembling a complex device that appeared to be some manner of winch — constructing the construction equipment.  Bags of unmixed cement formed makeshift walls, creating from the half-deconstructed hotel a maze which Izak navigated with the swift precision of an author crafting a complex mixed metaphor, ducking this way and that, making sharp turns that seemed to double back, but ultimately arriving at his intended destination: a large, open space, a makeshift auditorium whose stage was constructed above a newly-built pool, lit with ambient red torches that directed the eye toward the figure seated on a leather recliner on the stage’s center, dressed in a fine black dress, long legs crossed with shiny high heels at the end, and long, curly red hair outlining her round-cheeked, perfectly made-up face with the barest hint of a smirk.

“Why hello there, Cashandra.”  Her voice oozed bravado, as thick as the paint fumes that mixed with the sugar and smoke in Cash’s mouth.  Just as sweet, and just as deadly. “It’s been far too long.”

“Penelope Farthington,” Cash said coolly, gripping her smoldering pixie stick in her teeth.  “Love the new digs. Very, what do you call it, post-structuralist.”

Penelope gave a hearty laugh, accentuated with a beckoning finger; Cash stepped forward on instinct.  “I see you’re as quick-witted as ever, detective. Izak, you’re dismissed.”

She turned away and waved her hand once as if swatting a fly; Izak humbly bowed and left the room without a parting comment.

“Bold of you to vacate the room and leave yourself alone with your worst enemy,” teased Cash, one eyebrow arched, now returning Penelope’s half-smirk.  “You must think quite highly of yourself.”

“I just know you’re not stupid enough to try anything.”  Penelope stood up, legs reaching all the way to the floor as the legs of non-flying creatures tend to do, and strutted over to Cash, so close that her breath disturbed the pixie stick smoke.  “Now, not that I’d ever begrudge our little games, but what in particular brings you to my current abode, if you don’t mind my asking? I didn’t send you an invitation this time around.”

Cash removed the pixie stick this time, causing a puff of smoke to hit Penelope right in the eyes.  “I’m here to see a man about a pudding. The whole shebang.”

Penelope didn’t even blink.  She began to pace around Cash, making the detective spin on her heels in the way that only a nut can.  “Let’s say I happened to know something about pudding. Why should I tell you?”

“Because I know that your real prize is the Eye of Perseus.  That’s what this whole auction is about. Now, I could send an anonymous tip to the constables.”  Cash stepped in front of Penelope, forcing the master thief to stop abruptly in her tracks. “Maybe they’d catch you in the act, maybe they wouldn’t.  But what I’m after is the pudding you stole from Castle Jugland.”

Penelope grabbed the pixie stick from Cash’s mouth, twirled it between her fingers, and pinched out the smoldering flame.  “The pudding _I_ stole?  You seem to be confused, Cash.  Why would I steal something so heavily guarded that would fetch so little a price?”

Cash took a quarter step closer and grabbed the ashen end of the pixie stick; it crumbled slightly in her hand.  “You don’t need me to tell you that. You needed to weaken the guard around the shrine where the Eye is housed.”

“Well that doesn’t make sense.”

Everyone in the room turned to stare at Macy, her frank observation having pierced the bubble of caliginous tension that was brewing between Cash and Penelope, scratching the record on their two-person tango.

Macy glanced around nervously.  “What? All I’m saying is, if she had the resources to get in and out of the castle unseen and take the entire royal pudding vault with her, she wouldn’t need to bother with any of that since she could just put those resources into stealing the Eye directly.  It wouldn’t be significantly harder and there would be fewer moving parts.”

Penelope smiled as she yanked the pixie stick out of Cash’s fingers once more; it tore open, spilling a small pile iridescent white powder onto the floor.  “Precisely. What’s your name, child?”

“Macadamia the Nut, fourth Marquess Jugland.”  She immediately covered her mouth, eyes wide, realizing that she maybe shouldn’t have given out her full name and title to a criminal mastermind.

“Well then, Marquess.” said Penelope as she sauntered over to Macy.  “I must say, I’m impressed. Most of the royal family is either goody two-shoes who are far too quick to trust or conniving schemers who can solve anything but the blatantly obvious.  You’ve got a good head on your…” She looked Macy up and down. “…legs.”

“That’s because she’s adopted,” Robin piped in to a small round of chortling.

“The point is I like you,” continued Penelope.  She knelt down, hands on her knees, to look Macy in the eye.  “I like your moxie, kid, so I’ll give you this one for free. I didn’t have anything to do with the pudding theft, but I knew it was going to happen, and I am in fact taking advantage of that to steal the eye.”  She turned to face Cash and stood up slowly. “Not that you have enough evidence to convince the constables of that, so good luck stopping me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” murmured Cash.

“At any rate, I don’t know who stole the pudding, but I know who commissioned them — or rather, who conveniently turned a blind eye at just the right moment for all the pieces to fall into place.”  She pulled a pixie stick from Cash’s pocket and held it out, her wrist casually limp as if to emphasize how effortlessly she had nabbed it. “Someone who has a long-standing dislike of the Duke and the diplomatic immunity to get away with it.”  She flipped her long red locks, gazing into Cash’s eyes with a playful whimsy. “You know who I’m talking about, of course.”

Cash yanked the pixie stick from Penelope’s outstretched hand and pulled out her lighter.  “You mean Bubblegum’s man,” she postulated as she lit the stick. She watched the flame leap up, igniting the powder-filled tube, before snapping the lighter shut with a forceful click.  “Ambassador Blondie. You think the orders came from the top?”

“Who’s to say?  Whatever went down at the palace seems to have cooled things down between the Duke and the Princess, but four decades of hate don’t evaporate so quickly.  All I know is Blondie arranged for a lot of interesting personnel changes and one of his staff members came down with a case of the loose lips.”

Cash grimaced.  “So in other words, there’s nothing I can do.  Between his diplomatic immunity and his connection to the castle guard who’ve got a stranglehold on the investigation at the palace, Blondie’s invincible.”

Penelope laughed again.  “My, my, Cashiel, aren’t you quick to give up?  I understand you’re having a rough day, but you’ve forgotten your secret weapon.”  She gestured to Macy.

“Me?”  Macy pointed at herself with her thumb, as if clarifying what she meant by ‘me’.  “What can I do?”

“You’re the Marquess.  You can probably distract Brownie and his retinue while Cash scopes out the place.”

Macy scratched her head.  “Somehow I thought you were going to say something different.”

Penelope clapped her hands; Izak appeared out of the shadows behind Robin, causing the rainicorn-dog to jump straight into the air, hit zhir head on the ceiling, and rapidly shift between color schemes.  “Izak, please escort our guests out of the hotel.” She gestured to the pile of pixie dust and sugar on the floor. “And then clean that up.”

“I'm not cleaning that up.”

* * *

“This case just keeps getting more and more complicated,” groaned Robin as they approached the towering Candy Embassy, a great gingerbread building just outside the castle grounds.  In front of the embassy, Macy could spot two familiar figures — her brother Pen and the guard captain — arguing heatedly, gesturing angrily with not just their arms but their entire bodies.  She couldn’t quite make out what they were saying over the stead midafternoon breeze that carried with it the sting of snow-cold from the frosted peaks of the Sienna Ridge. “Looks like these nerds are arguing about protocol right in front of our suspect’s front door.”

“Alright,” whispered Cash.  “I don’t want Captain Mél to know I’m here, since I’m technically not allowed on the castle grounds, so here’s the plan.  Robin, use your rainicorn-dog powers to make me an inconspicuous color.”

“I have no idea what sort of color would be inconspicuous.”

“Just, like, a dark brown or something.  Macy, you approach the front door and try to get someone to take you to Blondie; when you get there, lead him outside in whatever way you can.  Maybe swap stories about the Candy Kingdom.”

“I never told you I came from the Candy Kingdom,” Macy said slowly.

“You got adopted by a duke; the circumstances of your adoption were in literally every paper.  You do that, and I’ll sneak around back. I’m guessing embassy security won’t be the castle guards’ top priority at the moment.”

“You’re guessing?”

Cash stood still as Robin carefully darkened her shell, zhir horn flashing in concentration as zhe adjusted the color to better match the wavelengths of the ambient light.  “Detective work isn’t all about deduction, kid. Sometimes you need to take a leap of faith. Now go!”

As Macy stalked up to the bickering Pen and guard captain — Mél, she supposed — she turned to whisper to Robin.  “What are they saying? You have better hearing than me.”

“Than I.”

“No one cares.”

“They’re arguing about Ambassador Blondie.  Mél says that since Blondie has a verified alibi and there isn’t enough room in the embassy to store all that pudding, they should direct the investigation’s focus elsewhere.  Your elder brother wants to divert some of the guards to conduct a thorough search.”

It was a good thing Robin explained this, too, for by the time Macy entered earshot the exchange had lost all semblance of sense; the two were merely hurling meaningless invectives at each other.

“You really need to know your place, Penhaligon,” Mél growled, reaching for her sickle.

Pen barked back, “and _you_ need to learn how to do your _job_ , Captain Tight—”

“Hey guys!” shouted Macy.  The two turned to lok at zhir, Pen with a look of annoyance that quickly melted into relief, Mél with her characteristic focused gaze.  Macy began to hyperventilate. The eyes, the eyes, they were _looking_ at her, they could see right through her, they were going to—

She felt a hand on each of her shoulders at once — one from Robin behind her, the other from Pen in front.  “Hey, little sis,” said Pen, his voice all tender now. “You doing okay?”

“Yeah, for now,” admitted Macy.  Her breathing didn’t slow, but it stopped speeding up.  Robin came around to her front and started whistling to distract her, conjuring some random shapes and colors.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for sending you off like that.  It was a lot of pressure to put on a little girl. I just knew you wanted to be a hero, so I figured I’d give you a chance.”

“That’s not necessary,” chided Robin.  “Macy’s already a hero.”

“How so?”

A beat.  “Hey, I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

Mél cleared her throat.  “If that’s all, then I must be going; there is _actual_ work to be done.”

Pen shook his head disapprovingly, not even looking at the guard captain.  “Don’t listen to them, Mél; they’re just bitter because they’re mad I’m right.”

Mél threw up her arms in exasperation; Macy was taken aback by the gesture, since it was the first time she had seen the guard captain without her hand on her scythe’s handle.  “Well, yeah, but— I mean no!” She covered her mouth and grimaced, but there was no recovering from a slip-up like that.

“So did you two manage to find Cash Daniels okay?” asked Pen.

“Nope,” answered Robin hastily before Macy had a chance to respond.  “We got lost or something.”

“Or something?”

“Or something.”  Robin began shifting colors faster.

“Hey, do you know whose house that is?” Macy butted in before Robin could melt into a puddle of liquid pyrotechnics.

“Don’t you remember?” said Pen, not breaking eye contact with Robin.  “Dad told you as we passed it on the way in. That’s the embassy where Old Man Blondie lives and works.”

“Blond’s not that old,” protested Mél; her disposition now, posture shrunken, voice timid, seemed almost alien compared to how she had been up to this point.

“He’s an old fart,” Pen shouted at Mél, his whole body turned halfway to face her, in a teasing cadance.  Turning back to Macy, he asked, “You want to go say hi?”

This time Macy was well aware of Pen’s ulterior motive, but it so closely aligned with her own that she couldn’t really be mad at him about it; she briefly clenched and unclenched her fist, exhaled as if the exiting breath contained her hypocrisy, and said, “Sure, big bro.”

“…fine,” muttered Mél, resting her hand back on her scythe as she reluctantly led them up to the front door of the embassy, dragging her feet the whole way.  “I just want it on record that I think this is a waste of time.”

“What, saying hi?” asked Robin, gradually reducing the frequency of zhir opulent oscillations.

“…yes,” answered Mél through gritted teeth.

Macy leaned over to whisper in Robin’s ear.  “Nice job keeping her off balance. Now she’ll never suspect what we’re actually up to.”

Robin pouted.  “It was a genuine question.”

They reached the door, a large wooden double door with a well-worn brass knocker that looked desperately in need of polishing.  Mél gingerly lifted the knocker by the image of Princess Bubblegum’s head which adorned its handle and sounded it against the door three times; no response issued forth from within.  “This is the castle guard, open up!” she demanded, knocking thrice again, much louder this time; once more there was silence, save a quiet shuffling of paper that the guard captain could only pick up through the vibrations that passed through the door and up through her fingers, a soft tingling sensation that she figured must be what it felt like to be an elephant.

So, like an elephant would, she rammed into the door with her elbow, busting it down.  If she was going to capitulate to Penhaligon’s games and investigate the ambassador, she wasn’t going to do it halfway.

Once inside, Mél took her scythe out of its sheath and held it low to the ground in both hands as she strode dexterously through the lobby of the embassy and toward a room in the back whose door was ajar.  The lobby was in disarray, tables and bookshelves scattered across the floor, with a carpet of loose papers so thick that Macy couldn’t make out the design of the actual carpet beneath it. She slipped on a pile of pink papers that at a glance seemed to be some sort of tax forms; Robin picked her up on zhir back as zhe raced past, weaving over obstacles like a snake as zhe caught up to Mél and Pen just as the latter flung open the door with the words `“BLONDIE PALMERSON”` engraved on a nameplate.

The scene on the other side of the door was more than enough to cause Macy to fall off Robin’s back in shock.  The office — for Macy could see it was an office from the burnished pine desk which a fancy swiveling chair on one side from a cheap folding one on the other — was in quite a bit of disarray, so to keep herself from parsing it, she examined the parts that weren’t. She noted the pictures on the wall, images of nature and of the Candy Kingdom capital, plus one of the Princess and her family that reminded Macy of the drawing that probably still hung over the door of the orphanage.  She noted the large electric light that illuminated the room, set into the ceiling, with a fluttering moth somehow trapped on the wrong side of the glass; she noted the cracked bookshelf on one side of the room, filled with history books and gossip magazines.  She noted the framed photograph of a roughly cubic, tan-colored man (Blondie, she assumed), holding hands with a pink gumdrop with a bow, a tiny cupcake in front of and between them, that sat miraculously undisturbed on far corner of the desk. She noted the window with curtains drawn; a tiny parting allowed through a ray of natural light, its inherent blue mingling with the electric yellow of the ceiling light in a mildly disconcerting manner.

In other words, she did her very best to note anything other than the dead body in the middle of the room.

Blondie lay motionless, a long white-bladed sai sticking out of his chest; brown sugar and vanilla extract soaked through his freshly-torn formal white shirt, dampening the impromptu paper carpet beneath him.  Above him, holding a matching sai in whose fulcrum lay a smooth oval lapis gem, stood a tall, thin, white-skinned figure with dark gray horns in a simple, unmolested red dress, a perverse mixture of panic and pride in her overly-toothy grin.

“Bandit Princess!” gasped Mél, her voice small.  She held up her scythe in an attempt at a threatening gesture, but her arm was trembling, so she couldn’t keep her weapon straight.  Pen stood shock still, his posture unnaturally straight, as if he believed the murderer before him wouldn’t see him if he didn’t move.  Robin backed up, curling zhirself around Macy, zhir fur standing on end, now cycling through colors so quickly that she merely looked grey.  As for Macy, her head was swimming and her vision blurring; she could not so much as acknowledge the scene before her.

Bandit Princess’s green, catlike eyes sized up the newcomers, panning across the scene searching for the next course of action, like a predator sizing up a large herd of prey to see which one it could most easily separate and devour.  Mél tightened her grip on her scythe and took a too-slow step forward; still, it was enough to give the alabaster intruder pause. Seeing this, Pen feebly reached into a satchel concealed by his toupé and withdrew a small green-tipped lance.

Bandit Princess stepped back at this, drawing the other sai from Blondie’s body and settling into a defensive stance, scattering flakes of candy viscera in the process. In that moment, Macy thought the fact that candy viscera was indistinguishable from regular candy did nothing to make it less disturbing; she would probably not be able to eat candy for quite some time.

For five agonizing seconds, nobody dared to move.  Nobody dared to blink. Nobody dared to breathe. An unspoken question hung in the air.

Bandit Princess answered it by sprinting toward the window, slicing the curtains with one sai and shattering the glass with the other before leaping through and landing with a thud on the gravel outside.  The sudden rushing in of crisp spring air, tousling Bandit Princess’s dress and Pen’s toupé, was an unwelcome pleasantry.

Mél chased after Bandit Princess, but Pen saw Macy hyperventilating and picked her up in his short yet surprisingly strong arms, to Robin’s protests.

“Come on,” he said; “let’s get you home.”  His voice was close to breaking.

* * *

Cash Daniels didn’t know what was happening when, as she was attempting to jimmy the lock to the embassy’s back door, a loud shattering of glass erupted from the side of the building.  She didn’t need to. She immediately dropped her lockpick and ran over to the scene; it came into view just as Mél was defenestrating herself. Cash saw the fleeing figure — someone she didn’t recognize — and elected to pursue.  Sometimes it doesn’t matter what possibility is more likely to be right; sometimes it’s about which guess can’t afford to be wrong. If the figure was innocent, Cash could ascertain that when she tracked them down. If they were guilty, she might not get another chance.

“Hey, what are you—” started Mél when she saw Cash, but she stopped herself pretty quickly.  Mél might be stubborn, but even she could tell there were more important things than protocol.  In this world it was chase or be chased, and the only…

Dammit, Cash was letting her mind wander.  She focused on running, and simply by doing that, her speed tripled.  She never understood how things like that happened, but she wasn’t about to complain.

Eventually, the figure reached the streets, ducking down side alleys, attempting to use their agility to their advantage.  That proved to be a mistake; what Cash lacked in dexterity, she made up for in familiarity. The streets are like wild animals.  You can’t tame them with brute force; you have to know them long enough for them to accept…

The figure disappeared over the edge of a rooftop.  Grunting, Cash climbed up after them. She was joined shortly behind by Mél, who used her scythe as a pickaxe to scale much faster than Cash, helping the detective up when she beat her to the top.

“Who is this dark damsel?” asked Cash as they picked up their pursuit of the now once-more distant figure along the roofs.

“First of all, that’s a really freaking weird way to phrase it,” said Mél.  “Why do you feel the need to talk like that?”

“Your reservations are noted.”

“Second, that’s Bandit Princess.”

“That means nothing to me.”

“She’s a bandit who is also a princess.”

“Okay, yeah, that explains it.”

Once again they began to close the lead.  Bandit Princess, intent on not falling, hadn’t turned back to see them approach yet, but she would soon.  “I’ve got a plan,” said Cash.

“Oh, no, I’m not going to follow your lead, civilian.”

“Okay, you need to get a grip.”  Cash forced Mél’s scythe-hand down without breaking stride, forcing her to pay attention.  “This isn’t about rules and regulations. This is about justice. Justice doesn’t come from the chain of command or from following protocol, it comes from the people who sacrifice everything to make it happen, whether or not they wear a fancy uniform while doing so.”

“You mean like yourself?” asked Mél incredulously.

Cash thought about that for a moment.  “No,” she decided. “Not like myself.” After all, she had no intention of telling anyone about the Eye of Perseus.  Maybe it was that she found it hard to get mad about a crime with no victim, but still, her cause couldn’t be justice if she only cared about those injustices that made her mad.  “I’m thinking more like… like the new Marquess, Macy.”

The answer surprised Mél as much as it had surprised Cash the moment before she gave it.  “So are you saying I should let a twleve-year-old fight crime?”

“No, I shouldn’t.  I mean, you shouldn’t.  I mean, do you want to do my plan or do you have a better one?”

A beat.  “I’ll hear it out.”

“No time.  Hey!” she shouted, getting Bandit Princess’s attention.  She noticed how close the two had gotten and glanced around for the best way to put some more distance between them.

An idea popped into Cash head; she veered sharply to the left, making Bandit Princess’s decision for her.  Mél followed her lead, catching on pretty quickly to the general gist of Cash’s plan if not the specifics. Cash put her hand on a smooth round chimney exhaust, using it as a fulcrum to change her direction and slinshot herself straight toward Bandit Princess.  As she ran, she took out another pixie stick and tried to light it, but the soot from her hand extinguished the budding flame once, twice, thrice; sighing, she tore the stick open, poured the contents into her mouth, let the empty wrapper flutter away in the wind, and kept running.

Mél overtook her and threw the wrapper right into her eye.  “Don’t litter.” She started wiping soot off her scythe with the inside of her uniform pocket.  “Can you tell me why we’re leading Bandit Princess toward the commercial district?”

“No, since she might overhear us.  Right!” she shouted. Mél tok a second before leaping to the right; apparently she didn’t realize that was a direction.  Bandit Princess saw the pair of them approaching again and darted to the left.

After a few more zigs and zags, they managed to force Bandit Princess to abandon the roofs and take to the streets once more.  They chased her down a side alley until they came to a dead end; realizing that if she tried to climb Mél would be able to beat her to the top, Bandit Princess elected to instead press her back against the far wall, her sais held at angles in front of her, her stance low and wide.

“Surrender yourself in the name of nut justice!” demanded Mél, advancing slowly, her scythe outstretched.  “You are under arrest on suspicion of murder, fleeing the scene of a murder, high conspiracy, and grand theft pudding.  You will be given a fair trial per the regulations of the Constables Jugland, the Duchy of Nuts, the Candy Kingdom, and the Great Court of Ooo.  If you res—”

With a blindingly-quick swipe, Bandit Princess knocked the scythe out of the approaching guard captain’s hand; there was an ear-piercing scrape of hardened ceramic on metal, and then the scythe embedded itself firmly into one of the side walls of the alley.  Mél, enraged, went in for a punch, but Bandit Princess easily ducked the blow, causing Mél’s fist to loudly impact the wall behind her. Mél was paralyzed by the sudden jolt of pain; Bandit Princess grappled her by the arm, whirling her around, and put one of her sais right under the guard captain’s mouth.  Cash leapt forward to assist, but Bandit Princess glared at her with murderous intent. The detective backed down almost instantly as her heart and brain throbbed in a discordant harmony of panic.

“Don’t you idiots know better than to corner a beast?” cackled Bandit Princess.  “I’ve basically won already!” She started advancing, carrying Mél with her; Cash backed up, not wanting to do anything that might set Bandit Princess off.

Or, more accurately, not wanting to do anything that might set Bandit Princess off or cause her to look back and up at the alley dead end punctuated by the west wing of the Bramblebush Hotel.

With the swift silence of a valet who knew how not to be intrusive, which was the same swift silence as that of a skilled assassin, Izak leapt from the roof, knocking Bandit Princess out cold with a single swift gravity-assisted chop.

“I apologize if this ruffian was giving you trouble,” intoned Izak in that unemotional tinny monotone.  “I would hate if any harm befell such upstanding agents of justice.” Despite his flowery words, he made no move to help the guard captain out from under her limp attacker.

“No trouble at all,” replied Cash, making a quick lip-zipping gesture that she hoped Mél wouldn’t notice.  Izak registered her meaning; his help here was the price of her silence.

“Well, thanks for the assist,” grunted Mél, cuffing the unconscious Bandit Princess’s hands behind her back and picking her up bridal-style.  “We’ll — oof — be on our way, then.”

“Until next time, then,” and then Izak bounded up the walls with supernatural ease, disappearing through an open window and slamming it shut behind him.  Cash knew she danced with darkness for the sake of light, but some darkness had a flair she could respect.

* * *

When Macy returned to reality, she was lying down on her bed.  Robin was looking over her, crystal eyes wide with worry; Pen was gazing out the window thoughtfully, looking out at the Valley of Moths below; the Duke of Nuts was tidying up the room, attempting to unfurl the remains of the clothing knot.

“What happened?” she asked blearily, trying to piece together how much of what she remembered was real and how much was some horrible nightmare.

“You’re awake!” exclaimed Robin, hugging her.  “I was so worried about you when I couldn’t feel you dreaming.”

“I didn’t dream?”  She rubbed her eyes.  “Then that was real?”

“Yes,” said Pen, not turning away from the window.  His voice was hoarse. “I’m sorry.”

The duke didn’t say a word as he ran to the bed and caressed his newest daughter.  He sobbed, and he smelled salty, like he’d been sobbing for a while. Macy leaned closer to him, and it was like the tension in her slowly started pouring out, releasing its grip on her just enough that she no longer felt like she was drowning.

“Well,” said Macy, chuckling nervously, “all told that was pretty fun until it wasn’t.”

“I never should have given you such a dangerous task,” said the duke.  “I didn’t expect you to see something like that. I was just so worried about the pudding I wasn’t thinking clearly, and I knew you wanted to be a hero, so—”

“Don’t,” called Pen, turning from the window; his toupé was lopsided, and his cheeks were stained with running eyeshadow.  “It’s my fault. I’m the one who asked her to find the detective. I just wanted to get under Captain Amélie’s skin, and I dragged you into this.”

“You’re _damn_ right you did,” growled Robin, startling Macy; the unicorn-dog got up from zhir hug and stomping across the bed to glare at the Marquess.  “You should have known better! I don’t know what’s going on in this castle, but it got my friend hurt emotionally, so I—”

“It’s okay,” interrupted Macy.  A beat. “Well, it’s not _okay_ per se, but I think this needed to happen.”

“What do you mean?” asked the duke, scooting a half-foot away from Macy so he could turn and look her in the eyes.

“I still want to be a hero, maybe now more than ever.  I was always going to have to confront… to confront death.  Better to get that out of the way now, when I have you guys to look out for me.”  She looked at her trembling hand, and then behind her at the desk by the window where the purple two-dollar coin rested.  “Plus, it helped me understand what it meant to be a hero, in a way. I think it has to be about preventing pain and loss for it to mean anything.  And I can’t try to prevent those things if I don’t experience them firsthand.”

“Even so, I wish you didn’t have to experience them so harshly.  I promise I won’t let anything like this happen again.” And then he hugged her tight.

“I love you, Dad,” she whispered.

“I love you too, my daughter.”

After a few solid minutes of hugging and crying, Macy went into the bathroom to wash the tears from her eyes; Robin took the opportunity to ask about something zhe hadn’t wanted to discuss with zhir friend in the room.  “So what’s the deal with Bandit Princess?”

“She’s a wanted criminal notorious throughout the land of Ooo,” said the duke.  “She’s been in a thorn in everyone’s side since before the War that Never Was. She’s the nominal ruler of the City of Thieves, but she spends most of her time, well, doing banditry.”

“According to documents recovered from the embassy,” continued Pen, “she was hired by the late Blondie Palmerson to steal the royal pudding supply as part of a plan that, _from what we can tell_ , wasn’t ordered by Princess Bubblegum.”  He said “from what we can tell” as if he had wanted to leave that part out.  “The idea was for Blondie to ‘find’ the pudding, leveraging the resulting gratitude to get higher access levels to the castle’s internal affairs.  I guess Bandit Princess had other plans for the pudding, and when Blondie threatened to get in her way…” He sighed, and his voice broke again.

“Were you and him close?” asked Robin.

“Oh, not at all.  It’s no secret he didn’t really like any of us; why he was chosen as the ambassador is a mystery.  It’s hard to like someone who doesn’t like you. But I still didn’t want him to die.” The duke nodded in agreement.

Macy came back into the room at that moment, her face freshly washed.  “I think I’ll be okay now,” she said, “relatively speaking.”

“Well, relatively speaking, it’s pretty stuffy in here,” said Pen.  He threw open the window behind him; the incoming spring breeze, carrying with it the smell of blooming flowers and a faint crispness of mountain frost, was a welcome pleasantry.

Macy inhaled deeply, letting herself get lost in the moment.  As she exhaled, an image flashed through her head, clearer than any memory:  She was standing atop a mountain, surrounded by frost and flowers, wearing a thick woolen coat, scanning the mountainside with a pair of sleek pink binoculars.  She spotted someone buried under a snowdrift; Robin, who had been buried under a mount of snow, transformed into a sled, and the two raced down to save them. She could feel the slicing of the icy wind across her face more tangibly than the breeze that was really passing through her bedroom.  When they reached the victim, however, it was Blondie, and it was too late.

Robin shook Macy out of it.  “Come on, Macy, don’t get lost in your own head!”

“Alright,” Macy said, and the four of them headed out to get ready for Macy’s first dinner at Castle Jugland.  Still, Macy kept thinking about that vision, and not just because the image of Brownie was something she wouldn’t soon forget.  The other reason, and the one she was too embarrassed to tell anyone, was because that had been the first vision of herself as a hero she’d ever had which didn’t include Finn.

* * *

Captain of the Guard Amélie Faucher sat across from a restrained Bandit Princess in the dingy, dark interrogation room of Castle Jugland.  She took another swig from her bottle of stale water; it tasted like metal. Bandit Princess put on a coquettish demeanor, or the best approximation one can make of a coquettish demeanor when tied arm, leg, and waist to a cheap folding chair; she’d been making various asinine faces throughout the entire interrogation, and it was beginning to get on Mél’s nerves.

“I’ll ask you one more time, criminal,” demanded Mél, desperately trying not to shout, since she would probably lose her voice entirely if she did.  She’d asked everything many times, of course — how much she knew about the plan, where the pudding was stashed, how she managed to get in and out of the palace undetected, why she killed Blondie — but to no avail.  It was like the murderer didn’t even understand that she was captured, or perhaps more frustratingly, like she didn’t care. “Why did you steal the pudding?”

Bandit Princess fixed Mél with disconcerting glare; a slow smile spread across her face, like everything that had happened in the interrogation room — everything that she had ever done — was all part of some unfathomable game she had just realized she was going to win.  “Isn’t it obvious?” she asked, fluttering her eyelids. “To steal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is one of those chapters where I knew what was going to happen at the beginning and end but had a lot of trouble filling out the middle. Writing mysteries is hard, and as it turns out, it doesn't become easier just because you as the author know the answer — figuring out how the characters arrived at that conclusion in a way that feels earned is the bigger part of it. Apart from that, the toughest part of writing this chapter was giving it a distinct feel. Adventure Time had two noir sendups of very different varieties — BMO Noir and Root Beer Guy. BMO Noir was, obviously, very film noir, but with the typical existentialism of BMO episodes, while Root Beer Guy focused more on an unconventional hardboiled detective storyline where the noir elements were aspirational to the temporary main character. I wanted this chapter to feel different from either of those episodes, so that was what drove the creation and characterization of Cash — a no-holds-barred hard-boiled detective in a world where hard-boiled means something completely different, and often literal.
> 
> Bandit Princess is a character I knew I wanted to write about from the moment I knew I wanted to write about Adventure Time, simply because she's so unabashedly _simple_. There's something about her brand of unapologetic evil — not even evil, necessarily, just jerkishness — that I love, and that puts the general tone of Adventure Time in stark contrast. I enjoyed trotting her out for this little one-shot episode, and I might even do more with her if I think of some stories to put her in, but I think it would also be a perfect tribute to her character for this to be her only appearance in the story; after all, there's not anything more to her, and there doesn't need to be.
> 
> Marquis Penhaligon (the same Marquis of Nuts from the show who teamed up with that squirrel who hates Jake at the very end of “The Duke”), on the other hand, will definitely return. When I decided that I wanted the Duke of Nuts to be a character, I knew I had to do something with the Marquis. He was so young in the show that I could take his character in any direction I wanted. Not a lot about him has been revealed in this particular chapter, but as time goes on I hope it'll become clear where I'm going with him and how it ties into his only speaking appearance in the show.
> 
> Amélie Faucher, on the other hand, I have no idea about; I just needed a guard captain, so I made one. She doesn't even have a name. I have some ideas for things I might do with her, which could even turn her into a major character, but I'm not sure if I'm going to do any of them or not. Like all of the other characters introduced in this episode except Marquis Penhaligon, she exists to flesh out the Duchy of Nuts as a complete place. (In the interest of completeness, I should mention that the butler in this chapter is the same butler from Henchman, and the Duke's second son from the same episode will make an appearance at some point, as will his wife.)
> 
> Planning-wise, the last characters I decided to add were Penelope and Izak; there were always going to be characters that served that general role, but I initially hadn't planned on anyone who had such a history with Cash. Ultimately, I think their inclusion, while not strictly necessary for the progression of the plot, was very important to building up the noir aesthetic — Penelope in particular, like Lorraine from BMO Noire, serves as our femme fatale, except in a manner much more reminiscent of spades romance from Homestuck. (Keep an eye out, this probably won't be the last appearance of quadrants in this story.) And yes, she is in fact Penny from City of Thieves. Fun fact, Penny was originally going to take Bandit Princess's role in the Adventure Time episode “I Am A Sword”, and for a time she was also going to take her role in this chapter too! I'm glad she didn't, though; Bandit Princess is an amazing(ly simple) character in her own right.
> 
> The next couple chapters will probably be a bit less _extreme_ than this one was; don't expect every other chapter to have a body count going forward. Speaking of the future, the chapter after next will be the start of the first eight-chapter arc! Bet you can't guess where I got that idea from. It won't be as crazy-epic as any of the ones from Adventure Time, though, and its level of cohesion as a single story (as opposed to a series of episodes with strong continuity) will be on the low side.
> 
> Lastly, as promised, a quote from the next chapter:
> 
> “It’s no use, pa,” said another walnut at the table, shorter than the duke, with a goatee sloppily taped to his chin, shrugging in an ostentatious exaggeration of lamentation and speaking with an out-of-place brogue. “The numbers ‘ave got to ‘er.”


	3. Old Horizons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A new arrival to the Duchy of Nuts proves difficult to get along with.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I guess now's as good a time as any to give a shout-out to my wonderful mutual alpha readers, [IgnotusSomnium](/users/IgnotusSomnium/pseuds/IgnotusSomnium) and [Emmyllou](/users/Emmyllou/pseuds/Emmyllou)! They've been a great help shoving me off my high horse, especially when it comes to my often titanic run-on sentences. As I alluded to, I'm also alpha-reading IgnotusSomnium's ongoing work, [Occupation](/works/1087931), a Homestuck AU where… you know what, just read it yourself, it's really good. Let him know in the comments if I sent you there. Same goes for Emmyllou, but since the work I'm alpha-reading for them is currently in the process of being published, I'll link to its [prequel](/works/7744426) (warning: rated M) instead.
> 
> As far as the chapter itself is concerned, there's not much I want to say about it up top. I will say that I waffled a lot more on this chapter's contents, and even its title, than I had for the first two chapters. Really, that's to be expected; the first chapter was one of the first things I came up with when I got the idea for a fic and serves as the premise for pretty much everything to follow, and the second chapter is a fairly well-defined, self-contained idea (if one which explores and impacts the world of the story in many ways, some of which may not be apparent for a while). From here on out, however, the plot of individual chapters will often be more wholly defined by the plot of the story overall, which means I'll be making a lot more changes as I write depending on how the long-term plotlines end up calcifying. That's not to say that the main plot will kick off right away — when I call this a long fic, I mean a _long_ fic — but at this point any plot I give to Macy or Robin for an episode will be a part of their grander journey and must be afforded the corresponding level of scrutiny. (The current title, by the way, is a suggestion from Emmyllou — thanks!)
> 
> One last thing: A _lot_ of new characters will show up in this chapter. You don't need to remember them — plenty of them are only present so that it won't feel like I'm pulling them out of thin air when they become more important later, or to stand in for a perspective that needs acknowledgement — but it's still a lot. If you have trouble remembering all the names and roles, don't worry; one of the advantages of my wordy style of prose is that there's always room for me to add a few lines quickly re-establishing those things if it's been a while since a character showed up. In other words, you don't need to take notes, since the upcoming test will provide a formula sheet and is untimed.

Macadamia the Nut had no idea how long she had been running through the forest.  Days? Weeks? Decades? It hardly mattered; out here, time had no inherent meaning until you were out of it.  The dank fungal smell of decay told her something nearby had run out of time recently. Good; if she didn’t need to hunt, she could wait a while longer before fletching more arrows.  She smeared some mossy mud on her face to hide her scent and fingered the two-dollar coin she carried with her — her final token of civilization, after she had abandoned even her clothes for pelt rags — for good luck.  Slowly, she crept toward the clearing whence she smelled death; she was cautious to keep her feet on the roots of the thick-trunked trees surrounding her rather than let them audibly splash into the mud.

As she advanced forward, the vines before her began to grow denser and more knotted, until they became like long black hair choking her.  She took out an obsidian knife she used for sharpening arrows and began hacking away; as she did so, it only grew longer and longer, until it became impossible to move normally.  She was now swimming through the hair, stranded deep in outer space; she could see Ooo in front of her, with its unmistakable missing chunk.

She swam away from Ooo, toward the moon.  As she landed on the moon, she removed her space suit’s helmet and approached the tall-headed green man before her.  “Hello, King of Mars,” she said as the grey dust around her turned red in the light of the rising sun.

“Hello, Princess Cookie,” responded the King of Mars in a gregarious monotone.  “It’s time for the celebration. Don’t keep Finn waiting!”

He guided her to a large arena, within which she could hear the sounds of fighting.  Two banana guards stood by a giant iron door; they began opening it as soon as she and the King approached.  The tunnel inside was too dark to see. She looked the King in the eyes, nodded, and stepped inside.

When she emerged on the other side, she was in a jungle clearing.  She could finally see the dead body she had smelled earlier; it was Blondie, and Bandit Princess was standing over her, holding those two horrible sais, cackling madly.  The grass around Bandit Princess was turning brown before Macy’s eyes. Furious, Macy nocked an arrow, aimed it straight between Bandit Princess’s eyes, and fired.

Then she was jolted awake by a piercing headache.

She looked out the window.  It was an east-facing window, and she could see the faintest hints of the oncoming sunrise just peeking through from behind the peaks of the Sienna Ridge, the mountain range that made up the backbone of the Duchy of Nuts.  In front of that was the Valley of Moths, a forested area that Macy had passed through on her journey here from the Candy Kingdom. She hadn’t seen any moths, but it was possible they simply came out at night; she’d have to ask someone about that.  Castle Jugland sat right on the edge of the plateau on which the city of the same name was built, and Macy’s room was on the side of the castle which overlooked the cliff, so as she glanced down, she saw the sheer face of it and vertigo overcame her; she was made to sit down at the desk facing the window, wiping sweat from her brow.

Then there was a knocking sound, followed by a pair of green hands parting the window from the other side before the black-jowled, white-horned rainicorn-dog head attached to them popped up behind the window.  The newcomer gripped the edge of the windowsill with zhir front paws and then shrank her body so that her back half tumbled forward into the bedroom; she rolled forward three times before falling down on her side, panting.

“Hey, Robin,” said Macy, shutting the window behind her best friend, cutting off the biting chill of the early morning draft.  “What are you doing here?”

“I saw that you were moving around, so I was worried you were having bad dreams after what happened yesterday.”

“I think I did.”

“What happened?”

“I… I don’t remember.  I think there was a forest?  It’s all pretty hazy.”

“Well if you can’t remember then it must not have been that bad.”  Robin put zhir arm around Macy’s shoulder and started humming. “La-da-dee, la-da-daaa~.”

Macy shrugged off Robin’s arm and picked up a periwinkle envelope on her desk.  “Not now, Robin. It’s too early for music.”

“Are you ever gonna open that letter?”

She traced the signature on the front.  “To Macadamia,” in Masse’s expressive handwriting.  “Maybe once I feel like my life is less frenetic.”

“You know, a responsible friend would tell you that if you keep putting it off, you’ll never do it.”

“So you’re saying I should stop putting it off.”

“No, because I’m not responsible.”

Macy put the letter down.  “Well in that case, since I’m already up, I may as well get dressed up.  Today will be my first full day in Castle Jugland, as well as the first time I’ll really get to know a lot of my new family members since yesterday was so hectic.”

“You can say that again!”

“You’re right, I can.”  She opened her closet and pulled out a white collared shirt with a small chest pocket.  “You think this’ll do?”

“You’re asking the wrong rainicorn-dog.”

Macy slipped on the shirt, slid a purple two-dollar coin from the desk into her pocket, and headed toward the door.  “Okay, I’m ready.”

“No you’re not, young lady.  Brush your teeth!”

“I can do that before breakfast, it’s fine.”

“If you don’t do it now you’ll forget.  Now get brushing!”

Macy lumbered over to the other door in her room, the one that led to her private bathroom.  “Yeah, you’re _so_ irresponsible,” she muttered under her breath.

“Hey I heard that!  You should be thankful; if it weren’t for me, you’d need to go dentist in less than a month!”  Robin stared into the middle distance, zhir voice dropping to a hushed warble. “I can’t send anyone else to dentist.”

* * *

Since it was still early morning, and breakfast would not be served while the majority of the castle’s residents were asleep, Macy needed some way to pass the time until then; having nothing else to do which would not require more brainpower than she was willing to exert at this hour, she took a stroll through the castle garden, leaving Robin behind to mutter incoherently about dentists.

The garden was a relatively small, tidy affair, with mauve coyote mint, golden sage, and verdant lamb’s-ear lining the paths.  A copse of juniper trees surrounded a birdbath in the middle, where Macy’s new father, the Duke of Nuts, sat on a bench tossing seeds to the mountain jays — strange-looking birds, pewter on top and cobalt on bottom, looking all dressed up and ready to rock.  Their song was like a private melody, all rhythm and hushed tones, almost hidden by the rustle of leaves and the copper wind-chimes decorating the boundary of the garden; still, it was all the more powerful in how understated it allowed itself to be, as if the jays were sure their tune was catchy enough that it didn’t need to be loud to be remembered.  Macy found herself snapping along.

“Hey Dad,” she said as she got right behind him; he was so startled he fell off the bench, startling the jays into the trees and birdhouse.  One ornery corvid shook its wing indignantly at the clumsy duke.

“O-oh!”  The Duke put his ridiculous purple hat back on his head and sat back down on the bench, patting the open seat next to him.  “Hello, Macy.”

Macy leapt up to grab the back of the bench, barely missing it as she swung her arm in a wild grasping arc.  She tried again, this time tinging her wrist on the back ridge. Hissing, she walked around to the front of the bench, but before she could get in front of it she decided to instead vault the side railing; she hit her knee and clonked her head against the duke’s arm.

“Are you okay?” winced the duke, oblivious to his own injury as he helped Macy sit up.

“Yeah,” Macy assured him, righting herself and dangling her legs rhythmically as if to demonstrate.  “My shell’s so hard and thick that not much can hurt me.”

“That makes sense.  You macadamias are a tough genus.”  He furrowed his brow, as if there were something else he wanted to add but wasn’t sure if this was the time to bring it up.

“What about you?”

The duke rubbed his elbow.  “Oh, my arm’s fine. I’ve suffered worse.”

That wasn’t what Macy had meant, but she doubted the real answer she got would be any different.

Just then Macy heard a huffing and puffing, accompanied by plodding footsteps on the gravel garden path, before a courier shouted, “Mail for the Duke!”

“Oh!” exclaimed the duke, standing up, spinning around, and putting a finger to his lips.  “Please do be considerate; many people are still sleeping!”

“Sorry, sir,” rasped the courier, handing an envelope to the duke, who took it and hastily opened it.  “Urgent communique from the Candy Kingdom. Er, the capital, that is.”

The duke read the letter quickly, then slid it under his hat and shook the courier’s hand.  “Thank you very much, Reginut.”

As the courier jogged back into the castle proper, Macy turned to the duke.  “What does it say, Dad?”

He rubbed his arm again, slowly this time, a look of confusion on his face.  “Blondie’s replacement is arriving today. Much sooner than expected. I didn’t expect them to even read my communique about the incident until morning at the very soonest.”

They looked into each others’ eyes and said, simultaneously, “Speaking of the incident, how are you holding up?”  They burst out laughing, half genuine and half nervous; the duke had to hold onto his hat to keep it from sliding off his head, and Macy rolled onto the ground and dinged her arm against the bench seat.

“Ow.”

* * *

The first time Macy had seen the dining hall of Castle Jugland, she had been awestruck.  The curves of the room, imitating the shape of some enormous onion, seemed to magnify its size, modest by castle standards but nonetheless impressive from an orphan’s eyes; natural light streamed down from a small skylight at the top, complementing the artificial lights on the sides.  The faint smells of a thousand foods were baked into the walls, a discordant but tantalizing background to the distinct aroma of spiced ham that had emanated from the kitchen at the time. The table’s surface was rough-hewn in that self-aware manner whereby its imperfection made it seem even more perfect; the grainy surface had given Robin chromatic shivers when zhe ran zhir paw across it.

The second time, when she and the duke finally arrived for a breakfast of pungent cinnamon-raisin oatmeal, it already seemed normal.

“Glad you could join us,” croaked a wrinkly nut sitting at the head of the table, pointing an accusing hickory cane at the duke.  “Took you so long I though you were having breakfast with the birds!”

“I’m so sorry, my lovely wife!” exclaimed the Duke as he ran over to her, kissed her tenderly, and sat down next to her.  “I was just — um — in the garden with our newest daughter.”

“Hey,” said Macy feebly.  The duchess just glared at her.  Macy hadn’t worked up the courage to call her mom, or anything really.  She hadn’t seemed to agree with her husband about his ‘responsibility to the citizens’ for some reason, saying “[t]hat’s what orphanages [were] for, after all”.  Macy didn’t buy that, but then again Macy was biased.

“So you’re Mace, huh?”  The voice came from a teenage peanut at the other end of the table; she had a toupée like Pen’s but with purple highlights, and a hot pink jacket was made to fit her body through the creative use of a belt in between her lobes.

“Um, it’s Macy, actually.”

The teen turned her head ever so slightly, fixing Macy with a judgemental stare.  “…nah, I’m sticking with Mace. You don’t look like enough of a dweeb to be a Macy!”

“Hey!”

“It was a compliment, you dweeb.”  She pulled out a prehistoric graphing calculator and began fiddling with it.

“Archie!” scolded the duke.  “Be polite!” But Archie was totally zoned out on a TI-85 Breakout clone called “Orzunoid”.  If she were shown Breakout, a game which hadn’t survived past the twenty-first century, Archie would probably say that it was an Orzunoid clone.  She would then call its creator and players total dweebs for ripping off an inimitable classic. Little did she know it was she who was the dweeb.

“It’s no use, pa,” said another walnut at the table, shorter than the duke, with a goatee sloppily taped to his chin, shrugging in an ostentatious exaggeration of lamentation and speaking with an out-of-place brogue.  “The numbers ‘ave got to ‘er.”

Macy pulled out a seat across from the man who had just finished talking.  “You’re a weird one, Chesterfield.” She had only met him once before — yesterday morning, when she had first arrived at the caste — and already the image of his garish yellow tracksuit was burned into her retinas.

“Och, please, lassie, call me Galé,” he insisted, clutching his chest as if her use of his full name had been a personal insult to the strength of their nonexistent friendship.  “All me friends do, an’ if you’re me family, you’re me friend.” He held out a hand, adorned with a yellow fingerless glove, for her to shake; she reluctantly did, worried that his accent might be contagious.

“Say, Macy,” asked Pen after the group gave a short blessing to Glob for the feast before them, “where’s _your_ friend?”

“Zhe probably won’t be joining us.  Zhe’d get too nervous meeting so many people at once, so zhe’ll probably just introduce herself to you all one at a time.”

“Fair enough.”  He scooped some oatmeal from a central serving platter into the bowl in front of him.  “I got the feeling zhe didn’t much like me, anyway.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what was up with that,” Macy said as she poured herself a glass of orange juice.  The cold of the glass jug on her palms numbed the lingering soreness from her earlier blunders in the garden.

“I wouldn’t read too much into it,” mumbled the final member of the party, a quiet figure dressed in body-concealing white robes; they had been so quiet that Macy hadn’t realized they were there, and when they spoke up, she let the juice jug slip out of her hand, landing safely on the table and slapping her wrist with its handle.

“Zhe was under a large amount of stress,” continued the white-cloaked person in a slow, croaking tone.  “Zhe had just experienced a traumatic event and desired a convenient external target on which to pin the blame.”

“Insightful as always, Cousin Vesper.”  Pen rolled his eyes. “This isn’t the time for your psycho-babblery.”

“Yeah, but it kind of is, isn’t it?” Archie interjected without looking up from her calculator.  Even without being familiar with Orzunoid, Macy knew to be impressed by the teen’s ability to play with one hand while eating milk-drenched oatmeal with the other.  “I mean, after last night.”

“I weren’t trying ta think aboot that, Archie,” said Galé.  “Och, I’m still trying ta process it.”

“I say good riddance to bad people!” exclaimed the duchess, shaking her fist.  “He was a dillweed who made off with our pudding. If Bandit Princess hadn’t killed him, I’d have put him in the nutcracker myself!  Macy, pass the apple slices.”

She did so.  “I, uh, I’d rather not talk about this.”  She leaned over to Archie and whispered, “Do you guys actually have—”

“—nah,” Archie whispered back.  “Well, I mean, we still have the thing itself, we just haven’t used it since before Galé was born.  Nowadays we just use it for cool selfies.” A beat. “Well, I do, anyway.”

“Oh, that reminds me!” exclaimed the duke, slamming his hands on the table.  He began to recapitulate the letter he had received as Macy ate her oatmeal. Out of nowhere, Macy realized that recap was short for recapitulate; it bothered her that she hadn’t made the connection before.

“How soon is this new ambassador supposed to arrive exactly?” asked Pen.  “There’s still a lot of work to be done before they get here; we need to organize a welcoming committee, draft the transfer paperwork, move out all of Blondie’s personal—”  He choked on his words, then made a grasping gesture as though he could pluck the words out of the air and force them back down his throat. “—there’s a lot we need to do, and a day isn’t enough time.”

The duke waved his hand, giving his son the ghost of a pat from across the room.  “Don’t worry, we don’t need to do all that in a single day.” Then, quieter, hunched over his bowl of oatmeal piled high with cinnamon:  “We need to do it in half an hour.”

Pen spat out his juice.  The duchess harrumphed. Galé dramatically swooned out of his chair.  Archie kept playing with her calculator. Macy, who had been fiddling with her oatmeal, dropped her spoon handle-first into her bowl.  She was sure that if everyone hadn’t been staring at Pen, they’d be staring at her instead. She felt embarrassed for that hypothetical version of herself; that nonexistent Macy probably felt like she couldn’t do anything right, even eat breakfast.  Then, if for no other reason than to preempt the imaginative fugue, she got an idea.

“I can be the welcoming committee,” she volunteered.  “Me and Robin. While you guys take care of all that adult stuff.”

“Do you even know enough about the castle to do that?” asked Pen, eyebrow raised.

“I will assist,” replied Vesper, startling Macy once more; she had already forgotten they were there.  She nearly knocked over her orange juice, but Archie caught it on the broad side her spoon and nudged it back up right without taking her eyes off the pixelated screen.

“It is good that she participates in the management of the castle,” they continued, their tone at once mysterious and matter-of-fact, their white cloak billowing from hand gestures it served to obscure.  “If she is to forge her destiny, she must become the bridge between Jugland and Bubblegum.”

Macy looked at her father for help; he shrugged, a bemused grimace on his face.  Apparently this was normal.

“Don’t take it personally,” said Archie, dropping her calculator loudly onto the table.  “Vesper’s just a weirdo.”

“I am a _scholar_ ,” insisted Vesper.  “A student of arcane divinity, who peers through the veil of time to gaze upon fortune itself with my mind’s eye.”

Archie jabbed her spoon at Vesper, flicking a tiny bit of oatmeal onto their cloak.  “Hey Vess, what’s three plus four?”

Vesper dramatically took a step backward, clutching the bottom of their cloak and bringing it up over their face like a veil.  “Doom!” they bellowed in a low, extended vibrato. Their eyes scanned the startled expressions on the others; then they looked at each of them, numbering them off as they went around the table from the duchess to Macy.

“One, two, three, four, five, six…  _doom!_ ”  And in a panic they clamored up the side of the wall onto the truss supporting the stem of the onion that was the dining hall, opened up the skylight above, and fled out of sight.

Macy stared upward in utter bewilderment for the better part of a minute before breaking the awkward silence that had fallen over the room.  “Did they not notice how many people were at the table until now?”

Galé shook his head slowly, an amused smirk on his face.  “No, they did not.”

“Seven is considered an unlucky number in Breakfastian numerology,” the duke said by way of explanation.  “Vesper has been interested in occult studies since they were a small child; they’ve accumulated a large amount of knowledge from disparate worldviews, and it seems like they harbor the superstitions of all of them put together.  Just last week they refused to be in the same room as anything pink.”

Macy swallowed her latest mouthful of oatmeal; the aftertaste of cinnamon made her tongue feel like it was on fire, but in a good way.  “And that’s the person who’s going to help me welcome our new ambassador?”

Pen winked.  “Good luck!”

* * *

After finishing breakfast, collecting Robin, and heading to the castle courtyard, Macy only needed to wait five seconds before Vesper appeared, their white cloak seeming to materialize out of the shadows of the great gate that separated the castle from the city.  They said nothing, either because they were mysterious, or because they didn’t want to interrupt whatever Robin was saying.

“—not really my scene,” zhe finished, curling zhir body around so zhe could scratch zhir ear with zhir hind paw.  “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have nothing but respect for medical professionals, but I don’t think I could put in the effort required to be one.”

“I know what you mean,” said Macy.  “I used to think I wanted to be a singer — I’d always fantasize about singing with Marceline and the #1 Babes — but I don’t think I’m passionate enough to dedicate all my time to that.  It’d be a lot of work.”

“Wait, you think being an adventurer would be _less_ work than being a singer?”  But by Macy’s dilated pupils, Robin could tell that she was fantasizing about singing with Marceline and the #1 Babes.

“Adventurers make their own hours,” interjected Vesper.

Robin shot fifty feet in the air and right through all the colors of the rainbow.  “Glob-on-a-cob, man! Where’d you come from?”

Robin had no idea where Vesper was pointing.

“Anyway, ‘make your own hours’ is really just code for ‘work _all_ the hours.’  My grandpa T.V. learned that the hard way when he started his own detective agency.”

“The numbers add up either way.  The only choice is how to get there.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Vesper shrugged helplessly.

Then there was a loud horn from a parapet above the gate, following by Lisby, the castle butler, shouting out over the courtyard.  “Announcing the arrival of the — achoo! — convoy from Castle Bubble— _achoo_ ! — from Castle Bubblegum, the honorable amba— a— am _BASS_ ’dr _!_ ”  He ran back into the hallway that ran through the outer wall, muttering something about having “practiced that sneeze all week.”

“Ambassador Candice Corn,” amended a voice from the other side of the gate, as if she were too righteous to bother with predicates.  Then the gate creaked open, and on the other side stood exactly the sort of person one would expect upon hearing the name “Ambassador Candice Corn”, looking at nobody in particular as if nobody in particular had yet earned the right to be looked at.  

The sheer levels of snoot seemed to snap Macy out of her reverie.  “Hello, I’m Nakadamia the Mutt, morth Jarquess Fugland,” she said, extending her hand to the imposing conical figure before her.  “On behalf of the noble family I would like to formally welcome you to Castle Fugland.” A beat. “I mean—”

Ambassador Corn put a finger to Macy’s lips.  “Quiet. Ugh, it’s just like the Duke of Nuts to send an incompetent to greet me.”

“Hey!”  Robin got right up into the ambassador’s face.  “Don’t talk to my friend that way!”

“Friend?”  She quirked an eyebrow.  “And who might you be, exactly?” she asked, sounding preemptively disinterested.

Robin opened and closed zhir mouth a few times and looked to Macy for help; Macy thought for a moment, then made a motion with her hand to let Robin know that zhe could go now.  There wasn’t much point to zhir being here anyway, Macy figured; zhe didn’t really have any official capacity in the castle. Robin headed past the ambassador and out the front gate of the castle, to do whatever it was zhe did when Macy wasn’t looking.

“If you’ll follow me,” said Macy, trying in vain to lead the ambassador by the hand, “I’ll show you to the conference room where you can review the relevant ordinances and file preliminary paperwork.”  The ambassador began following, presumably intrigued by the notion of paperwork. “Also, I figure we can swing by the residential wing of the castle since you’ll have to stay there until the embassy building gets cleaned up after yesterday’s incident.”

“You mean the incident you let happen with your lax security.”

 _The attack that wouldn’t have happened if the person you’re replacing hadn’t been conspiring against my dad,_ Macy wanted to say, but despite not yet being thirteen, she still had the self-control to bite her tongue.  The fact that she didn’t want to talk about that horrible sight regardless may have strengthened her resolve to not turn the emissary’s insolence back at her.  Instead, she settled for, “Well, not me specifically.”

“Of course not.  A little girl like you shouldn’t be tasked with any big responsibilities.”

“I guess,” replied Macy, oblivious to the insinuation.

As they walked through the castle, Macy kept pointing out anything she was already familiar with, eager to demonstrate her knowledge, and Ambassador Corn kept finding ways to criticize whatever Macy was talking about.  Occasionally Vesper would clarify something or add some context, but they never stepped in to help Macy; for the most part they seemed content to play the observer, often remaining silent for so long that when they did speak up, Macy jumped in startlement.  Corn, on the other hand, was never startled.

“You’re rather jumpy,” she noted to Macy after Vesper had given an uncharacteristically thorough description of the lengthy sequence of artistic movements which inspired the pattern on the door to the conference room.  Apparently, this particular pattern was influenced by a revitalization of a reaction to a mixture of post-post-renaissance Slime Kingdom rollerpunk and absurdist Hotdog Kingdom empathetic geometry, a blend of styles with a vast symbolic dictionary based on the expression of the inexpressible forms characterizing the irreducible self as reflected in the viewer’s perception of meaningless patterns as quanta of meaning.  The pattern in question was a square.

Macy traced the square with her finger.  Maybe Vesper was right; this square certainly seemed to be what Macy was feeling like.  “Yeah, well, we’re here.” She opened the door, on the other side of which she saw Pen and an accountant still rifling through papers; Corn stepped through, and Macy and Vesper walked away.

“You seem troubled,” observed Vesper, their tone unchanged.  “Is something on your mind?”

“Two things,” Macy confessed.  “First of all, you didn’t stick up for me at _all_ back there.”

“I helped with the welcoming itself.  That is all I volunteered to do; emotional support isn’t my forte.  Now what was the second thing?”

 _You’re not even going to apologize?_   “It’s more of a general question on something that’s confused me for a while about the politics of this place.”

“You mean how the Duchy of Nuts swears fealty to the Candy Kingdom instead of the Nut Kingdom?”  Vesper sounded amused; excepting their outburst at breakfast, it was the first time they sounded like anything.

“Yeah, what’s up with that?”

“Well, the thing about that is, there’s a certain context you need to have in order to understand that, which is basically that, some time ago—”  And then they ducked into a darkened hallway and disappeared from sight.

Macy stepped into the hallway briefly but was unable to see them; she could still hear them giggling in the shadows, but she couldn’t tell where it was coming from.  She had always hoped that getting adopted could mean finding more friends her age, but Vesper was basically Chipolina from the orphanage except if Chipolina were a total wad.  Groaning, she walked away, making her way to her dad’s room.

* * *

Galé was rifling furiously through his father’s cabinet when the door creaked open and his new sister stepped into the room.  “Hey, Dad, can I ask you about— What are you doing here?”

Galé spun around, slamming the cabinet door with his foot and throwing his hands in the air in an unconvincing imitation of apathy.  “I’m allowed ta be here!” he said, louder than he had intended.

“Are you looking for something?”

“No!”  He tried to elbow the cabinet shut, but since it was already shut, all he accomplished was hurting his arm.  “Och, tha’ smarts!”

“Do you know where Dad is right now?”

“He’s busy tracking down Blondie’s fam ta drop off his personal effects.  That’ll hopefully take him a good half a day. I mean probably.”

Macy paused for a moment, resting a hooked finger on her bottom lip.  “Bluh,” she said, spitting out her finger, followed by, “Hey, you can probably answer this.  Why is the Duchy of Nuts not part of the Nut Kingdom?”

Galé stroked his taped-on goatee ponderously.  “That’s a long story, me lassie. ‘Tis a tale of intrigue and of woe, winding through the tapestry o’ history.  To know that tale is to know the very spirit of this land, the push and pull o’ fortune, and the great myths tha’ are the bedrock o’ this city.”

Macy’s eyes were wide.  “Wha— what are you saying?” she asked, her voice hushed.

“I’m saying tha’ the questions yer asking are tied to the very lifeblood o’ the Duchy!  Once you know that, ye’ll be unshakably a member o’ this city.” He punctuated this with a series of sweeping, grandiose gestures, stepping forward like an orator on a great stage.  “So shall ye drink from the chalice of knowledge, accepting the burden o’ truth? Or shall ye cower in ignorance, afraid o’ wha’ unpleasantries the light will reveal?” He took a massive step forward and reached out with a gloved hand, curling his uncovered fingers as if to draw her nearer.  “The choice is yours, _deirfiúr_.”

She tentatively took his hand, enraptured.  Closing her eyes, she could imagine the stage clearly — it was the pavilion in center of the Candy Kingdom, just outside Bubblegum Castle.  She and Galé were performing some manner of concert for a crowd of cheering onlookers, throwing roses onstage. Princess Bubblegum wiped tears from her eyes with a pristine white handkerchief.  “Breathtaking,” she uttered, before fainting onto her wife Marceline’s lap. Princess Torte momentarily stopped her riotous applause to make sure her mom was okay.

Macy gazed out across the audience.  They loved her. They couldn’t get enough of her.  They wanted to see what she would do next. They were looking at her expectantly.  They were watching her. They didn’t blink. The applause stopped. Something was supposed to happen, and Macy was supposed to do it, but she was frozen stiff.  Vines started growing up her immobile body; they covered her face, suffocating her with the thick smell of sap. As the pressure increased and increased, through the narrowing gap in front of her eyes she saw Princess Cookie and the Duke, far in the back, looking at her encouragingly but doing nothing to save her from the crushing plants, which were becoming heavier and more barklike with every second.  And next to Princess Cookie, his back turned, his arms crossed, was Masse Yvoire.

Macy managed to summon the strength to break one arm out of her floral prison.  She tried to reach out to Masse — past the infinite distance between them — to get his attention, so she could say whatever it was she wanted to say.  She heard the calcified vines snap as they tried to reach out, scraping dry and dusty against her arm. She managed to put a hand on Masse’s shoulder; he turned around, but it was not his face that appeared.

It was the lifeless visage of Blondie Palmerson.

Macy fell down, jolting awake as she crashed to the floor.  Galé helped her up, gesturing for her to climb into the duke’s bed; she did so gratefully.  “Y’okay, me lassie? I mean, obviously not, but d’ye need anything?”

“A distraction,” she mumbled.  “Tell me the story.”

“Are you sure yer up for it in your state?  ‘Tis not for the faint o’ heart.”

Macy grabbed a pillow and placed it in front of her, then rolled around to lay on her side, facing Galé at an angle with the pillow under the top of her head.  “Can you give me the short version?”

“No.”  He cleared his throat, then gestured toward the blank wall to the middle distance, where Macy fixed her eyes.  “It all started over five hundred years ago, when the pass was first settled by an explorer from the Nut Kingdom named Archibald Jugland…”

* * *

The stone dragon soared high over Jugland, concealed by thick clouds; its rider deployed a palm-sized metal glider with a camera attached.  Even through her thick pink parka, she still felt the biting chill of mountain air. She pressed a button on her goggles to trigger their built-in wipers, then looked at a small metal tablet in her hand.  The camera’s preliminary diagnostics were chill. She tapped dragon’s head, signaling it to begin a long, spiraling descent to a cliff face on the far side of the Valley of Moths, close enough to retrieve transmission data from the camera but far enough away to not be in range of immediate retaliatory strikes.

Princess Bonnibel Bubblegum leapt off, landing in a roll, just before the dragon touched down; she bowed to a quiet round of applause from the people before her.  This small cabal currently comprised her closest confidantes in the Candy Kingdom (and its contingent coalitions). First and foremost, there was Peppermint Maid, her short-statured, long-suffering advisor and voice of reason; she took such pristine care of her uniform that even here in the dust of nascent war it seemed to glisten.  Beside her, her opposite in every way, loomed the freshly-minted Colonel Candy Corn; rather than cleanliness, his outfit’s luster came from rows upon rows of medals earned in the relatively short time since he’d been cooked up in Bonnibel’s lab. Next to him was Gumbella, one of the few surviving relatives Bonnibel _hadn’t_ created; she’d found her wandering the wastes looking for pre-Mushroom-War technology to loot.  She wore a battle-ready dress fashioned from the rags she’d had on when Bonnibel first found her.  Holding her hand was the green-skinned Goblin General Gershwin, an ally of Bonnibel whose Goblin Kingdom uniform stood out among the Candy Kingdom citizens.

The only member of the entourage not applauding was Rattleballs, one of a line of advanced robots which had served as the Candy Kingdom’s police force for nearly a century; he looked uncomfortable in its military uniform, despite outshining even the colonel in accolades.  Ever vigilant, he kept one clawlike appendage on the handle of his holstered rapier at all times. His steel eyes scanned the horizon, zooming in on a distant mountain ridge. Other than that, he was stark still and silent.

“What’s the word, mama bird?” said Gumbella, stepping forward to greet her cousin and pointing a finger gun at her.

“The operation succeeded without a hitch,” replied Bonnibel, doffing her thick coat to reveal the very real, non-finger gun holstered on her belt.  “Pretty soon we’ll have a complete picture of Jugland’s infrastructure.”

As Bonnibel took off her goggles, Peppermint Maid grabbed them and the coat, folding them carefully into a bundle.  “Permission to speak my mind, Princess?” she asked.

“You always have permission to speak your mind.”  Bonnibel knelt down, bouncing on her toes with her hands on her knees, to look Peppermint Maid in the eyes.

She stared right into her Princess’s soul as she said, not for the first time, “I think this whole war is a terrible idea and you need to negotiate peace immediately.”

“Nonsense!” blurted Candy Corn in a deep, bassy voice that sounded more like an actor playing a soldier than an actual soldier.  “Slime Princess and her coalition have refused our most reasonable of terms. If we back down, it’ll set a precedent of rewarding bad behavior.”

“This isn’t about abstract ideals of right and wrong,” added Gershwin; he had let himself get dragged by Gumbella and now stood at a forty-five-degree angle, his free arm brushing the ankle-high snow.  “If it weren’t for the Candy Kingdom entering this war, it would have been the Slime Kingdom against us goblins. The Goblin Kingdom is mighty, and our dragons are swift and powerful, but we wouldn’t stand a chance against one of the three great kingdoms of Ooo.”

Peppermint Maid took a step backward and heaved a great sigh.  “Even so, I can’t help but feel this whole business is a bad idea.”

“Jugland has stood here for over two hundred years,” said Bonnibel, as if scolding the distant duchy.  “Its presence here, this far east, represents an implicit threat from the Nut Kingdom. The colonel’s right; if I were to let it stand in the face of war, I would be paving the way for future concessions to the Slime Kingdom Coalition.”

“Then why did you let it stand for two hundred years?” asked Gumbella, tilting her head in confusion.

Bubblegum brushed aside the question as if its answer should be obvious, taking out the tablet and showing it to Candy Corn and Gershwin.  “As you can see,” she said, gesturing to the colored dots that showed up between the green squiggles representing elevation levels in the valley, “there are factories here, here, and here, some sort of a military encampment here, and the entrance to the walnut mine is here.”

“Well then, our course of action is obvious,” pronounced Candy Corn, a wily smirk decorating his otherwise-stoic face.  “The goblins stage a strike on the factory to the south, and when the extensive units are forced to navigate across this mountain to send reinforcements, the Rattleballs division ambushes them from above.”  Bonnibel nodded in agreement.

“Won’t work,” Gershwin countered.  “The mine’s facilities are in operation, or else it wouldn’t get picked up by the scanner.  There’s no way Duchess Penrose hasn’t put the city on lockdown.”

“…which means she’s using it for something else,” finished Bubblegum, grimacing.  “Odds are they’re harboring reserve troops. Glob knows where they’re coming from.”

Candy Corn kicked the snow, revealing a patch of dried grass; a decaying smell trapped for years beneath the permafrost escaped all at once but vanished before anyone could so much as gag.  “As much as I hate to admit it, we need to do more recon. That’s more time for the enemy to build up force, and more time when our armies are dispersed, but we can’t march blindy into a trap expecting the Duchess to hand herself over on a silver platter.”

“Enemy approaching,” announced Rattleballs in a robotic monotone.  He drew his rapier and pointed with it to the ridge he had been watching.

Gumbella took out a pair of binoculars and zoomed in on the ridge.  “Looks like the Duchess is about to hand herself over on a silver platter.”

She passed the binoculars over to Bonnibel, who peered through.  Just like Gumbella had said, there was a small party consisting of the Duchess and her retinue; the standard-bearer, their emblematic sickle conspicuously hung on the front of their green uniform’s belt, waved a white flag high in the sky.  The message was clear:  “We come in peace prepared for war.”

Bonnibel lowered the binoculars, her eyes narrowed suspiciously.  “How do they even know what direction we’re in?” she asked to nobody in particular.

“I’m sorry, my princess,” said Peppermint Maid.  Bonnibel whirled around, drawing her pistol and pointing it at her trembling advisor; she stood her ground, albeit trembling.  “I had no choice. This war would have been far too costly to let it go on.”

“So you led the enemy _here?_ ”  She spread her arms in a gesture of exasperation; the main exhaled a small sigh of relief as the pistol was finally pointed away.  “What were you _thinking?_ ”

“I was thinking quite clearly, my Princess,” she insisted.  “As you can see, Duchess Penrose isn’t here for war. She’s here to offer her assistance.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Candy Corn said in a gruff staccato.  “Why would a duchess of the Nut Kingdom offer her assistance in a war against her own sovereign?  Especially when they seem to have a tactical advantage with the apparent force in the mines.”

“Hey, don’t ask me why,” said Peppermint Maid, shrugging.  “The fact remains that she’s offering to defect from the Nut Kingdom and swear fealty to you.”  She stared into Bonnibel’s eyes.  “War doesn’t need to be the only path.”

* * *

Robin sat in the Gusty Goat, shrunk to manageable proportions, downing zhir fourth shot of grape soda.  Zhe’d come here once before, just yesterday, but due to the events of that afternoon zhe and Macy hadn’t gotten the chance to come back; Robin had come here to buy Macy a ginger ale, and zhe was getting around to that, zhe swore.

“What even is my life?” zhe groaned.  “Stuff was so simple back in the Candy Kingdom.  Hardly anyone got kebabed, and there were no patronizing ambassadors making me question my place in the world.  Stupid, good-for nothing-ambassadors and their stupid, good-for-nothing perfectly legitimate questions.”

“I hear ya,” said Jeff, swallowing a mugful of foam with a splash of root beer at the bottom.  He wiped his lips on the sleeve of his cotton shirt. “Sounds like you’re having a rough go of it.”

“So you’ve been insulted by ambassadors, too?”

“No, I think they’re fine upstanding members of society who are important to the political functioning of Ooo.  I only said I hear ya.”

“Oh.”  Robin stared at the bottom of zhir shot glass.  Zhe could barely make out zhir reflection in the ripples stirred by the ambient noise of the bar.  Somehow, that reminded her of home. “You ever get the feeling that you might never find out who you’re supposed to be, and everything you think you know about yourself is just a lie you tell yourself so you can pretend like you have an identity?”

“No.”

“Yeah, me neither.”  Zhe turned to face Jeff, growing zhir neck just enough to look him in the eyes; he continued to stare blankly forward.  “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

The karuka tugged nervously at his shirt collar.  “Oh, you know.  I’d say I’ve got a pretty normal life. I was born and raised in Jugland, but I went out-of-duchy for trade school.  Carpentry.”

“Where at?”  Robin rested zhir chin on zhir crossed paws.

“Smokey Applewood, over in the Breakfast Kingdom.  They’re not exactly the best there is, but they offered me a 75% scholarship, and my parents weren’t exactly loaded.  Still, I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.”

“Heh.  Trade.”

Jeff went wide-eyed with shock and started trembling.  “No, no, no, no, no, no,” he repeated.

Robin touched his shoulder, worried.  “What is—?”

“PUNS!” he exploded.  He then leapt off his chair, tripped onto the floor, got up, and ran out the door, shouting, “I’VE GOT TO GET AWAY FROM THE WORDPLAY!”

Robin noticed Helix walking over nonchalantly, wiping down a glass mug.  “What’s his problem?” zhe asked.

“His name used to be Dillon Whedon.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It sounds like dillweed.”

“I don’t get it.”

“So people called him dillweed.”

“Why?”

“Because his name sounds like dillweed.”

“So?”

“So it’s a pun.”

Zhe thought about this for a moment.  “Okay, yeah, I’d probably hate puns too if I were in his shoes,” zhe admitted.

“It just goes to show ya,” they said, dropping the mug behind the counter with a loud shattering sound, “that you can’t judge a person too harsh for what yanks their whiskers.  More’n not there’s a reason at the heart of it.”

“Yanks their whiskers?”

Helix twirled one of their leaves at Robin.  “You know, rots their pumpkins. Pulls their teeth.  Staples their shoelaces.” A beat. “Stuff they don’t like much.”

“Did you make all of those up on the spot?”

“Only one, and I won’t tell you which.”  They winked; Robin made the slight head motion that would accompany rolling zhir eyes if zhir eyes actually had pupils.

“Hey, before I run out on you, could I get a bottle of ginger ale for the road?”

“Of course.”  Helix pulled an abacus from the top shelf and slid the knobs around at random.  “That’ll bring your total to $17.94.”

Robin reached into zhir pocket, remembered zhe wasn’t wearing any clothes, and then slithered backward out the door without changing zhir expression.

Helix set the abacus down on the bar, a frown plastered on their face.  “Frog-chasing dine and dasher,” they mumbled. “Really jingles my bells.”

* * *

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Duchess,” muttered the standard-bearer, a tall poppy, as she trudged ahead through the snowy path, holding the white flag aloft.  “All this snow _severely_ jingles my bells.”

“Have some faith, Helena,” insisted Duchess Penrose, her arms folded behind her back as if she were simply taking a casual stroll.  “I would do nothing I did not believe to be in the best interest of my people.”

“With all due respect, I’m unsure if we can trust the Candy Princess.  This whole thing could be a trap.”

“I don’t think that would be in her genre.”

“Think,” echoed Helena.  “For the sake of all of us, let us hope you had your thinking boots on when you decided that.”

“It’s too late either way.”  Penrose unclasped her hands in order to gesture with one of them toward the grey tent that sat on the other side of the ridge they were cresting, outside of which six figures sat by a campfire while a sleeping grey dragon half-encircled them on the other side.  “Our fate is upon us.”

Helena came to a stop, awaiting some signal from the Candy Kingdom cadre; there was an awful stretch as they discussed amongst themselves, the howling, bitter mountain wints covering up any traces of their conversation that could reach the approaching envoy, before a pink figure in purple with a gold tiara gestured them forward.  Bonnibel Bubblegum, it had to be. Cautiously, Helena advanced forward, handing a flag to a guard beside her and gesturing for the remainder of the retinue to take position at the top of the ridge as she led Penrose into the ad hoc encampment.

“Welcome, honored guests!” proclaimed Bonnibel, spreading her arms in what would be an inviting gesture if it weren’t so clearly choreographed to show off the multicolored pistol at her hip.  It looked like a toy, but knowing her reputation, it was likely more dangerous than the top-of-the-line robot with a metal claw on his rapier handle.

“Princess,” said Helena, her voice cooler than the ever-wintry air.  “I assume you have a hidden battalion poised to capture us the moment anything goes slightly wrong.”

She immediately dropped the façade of friendliness.  “And you as well.”

“There will be no need for that,” laughed Penrose, putting a hand on Helena’s shoulder as she stepped past; the guard captain stepped aside cautiously, her eyes darting between Rattleballs and Candy Corn, the former now resting a palm on the hilt of their cutlass as if emulating the latter, as she tried to decide who seemed the most impatient.  “You already know why we’re here.”

Bonnibel shot Peppermint Maid a poison glare before facing Penrose once more, all smiles again.  “Yes, and I’m ever so happy to hear it. Come, let us discuss terms.” She gestured for them to follow her back to the tent.

Penrose moved to follow, but Helena stuck out her leg and tripped her; the Duchess faceplanted unceremoniously into the snow.  “No, no, no,” said Helena, wagging her finger sternly like a mother lecturing a child doing something dangerous. “We discuss out in the open.  No walls, no tents.”

Bonnibel wheeled around, looking like she was about to shout something, but before she could get a word out, someone who Helena thought looked like a stockier, shorter-haired version of Bonnibel stepped in, halting the Princess’s movement.  “Understandable,” Gumbella said conciliatorially. She rummaged through a teal fanny pack. “Hold on, I think I have some instant furniture in here. Just add water!”

Grinning, she tossed three magenta spheres into the snow between Bonnibel and the now-half-standing Penrose; after a few seconds, two chairs and a table burst up from where the spheres, scattering dry snow everywhere.  Rattleballs flinched; whether because of the snow’s proximity to his circuitry or his briefly mistaking it for an attack, only he could say.

“Peppermint Maid,” commanded Bonnibel gravely as she pulled out the chair in front of her, sat down, and scooted in.  “Cocoa me.”

“I would like some cocoa as well, if it isn’t too much trouble,” added Penrose timidly as Helena helped her up and into her own chair.

“I’ll go put on a pot,” exclaimed the maid, clapping her hands.  “Gershwin, do you have any more of that cinnamon you used to flavor the canned rations the other night?”

As the goblin and the starlight peppermint headed over to the fire to set up the cocoa, Candy Corn placed some papers on the table.  “These are the terms that we find agreeable,” he said curtly. “Consider them carefully.”

Penrose picked up the papers and inspected them, mumbling to herself as she read.  She held up a hand next to the side of her head, and Helena placed a pen in it; Penrose immediately began crossing out and scribbling.  Wordlessly, she slid the stack, heavy with the pungent scent of drying ink, over to Bonnibel. The Princess read it slowly, growing more and more agitated, pulling out chunks of her bubblegum hair and chewing them, before spitting the whole wad out onto the snow when she reached the end.

“This is ridiculous!” she exclaimed, knocking her chair over and tossing the papers high into the air as she stood up.  She pointed at Penrose. “ _You’re_ ridiculous!  You want all the benefits of being a protectorate state without any of the downsides!”

Penrose shrugged.  “Here in Jugland, we call that ‘opening strong’.  I guess you do things differently over in the Candy Kingdom.”

Without warning, Rattleballs leapt forward; Helena threw herself in front of her duchess, closing her eyes and bracing for the cold sting of metal.  But none came. Cautiously, she opened first one eye, then the other, to see that Rattleballs had quickly skewered every piece of the treaty-in-progress — in order, no less — and deposited them neatly in the middle of the table, only a pinprick hole in their exact center to show for it.  He now stood right at the side of the table, directly in front of Helena, his rapier pointed skyward.

Nervously, Penrose reached out for the papers again.  “I… I can walk back some of these demands, then,” she stuttered.  Helena realized Rattleballs’ stunt had been more than just a means to salvage the replaceable paper on which the treaty draft was written.  It was a power move, and it had worked. Absently, she wondered if the whole incident had been staged. Had even Penrose’s deliberately-preposterous initial demands been factored in as a critical part of Bonnibel’s ploy?  It hardly mattered now.

The two leaders discussed the minutiae of annexation, jurisdiction, and inherited treaties for several hours and several dozen cups of cocoa.  As they discussed, Gumbella brought out more chairs and invited Helena to sit with her and Gershwin; after a bit of hesitation, she accepted, if only to pass the time, although she made sure to choose a chair that both was near the discussion table and had a full view of it.  Eventually, Peppermint Maid and even Candy Corn joined them, although the colonel never directly addressed Helena.

Well after the sun had dipped behind the peak of the Sienna Ridge to the west — what mountain folk referred to as a “coward’s sunset” — Bonnibel called the others over to the table.  “We’ve reached an agreement,” she announced excitedly. “Jugland has officially declared their allegiance to the Candy Kingdom.”

Helena strode toward Penrose.  “Does that mean—”

“That’s right!” exclaimed the Duchess, grasping the guard captain’s hands in her own.  “We can finally go to bed!”

* * *

“Wow,” exhaled Macy, who had over the course of listening to Galé’s thorough description of Jugland’s history, had managed to knock three pillows, two blankets, four stuffed animals, a fitted sheet, a wind-up alarm clock, and an ornery jay hellbent on revenge off her father’s bed and onto the floor.  “That was exhilarating.”

“Thank you kindly,” said Galé, bowing.  “I pride meself on me showmanship an’ me ability ta make anything interesting.”

“I mostly meant the part about the treaty,” Macy clarified.  “The rest was forgettable and unnecessary.”

“Aw.”  He looked dejected.

“It was still a good story for the parts that weren’t boring!”  She got out of bed and hugged him, and when he hugged back, he started to sniffle, just a little.

Then she tried to step out of the hug and ended up slipping on a fitted sheet.

As he helped her back up, she collected her thoughts.  “There’s still one thing that bothers me about that story.”

“What is it?”

“It didn’t actually answer my original question.  _Why_ did Duchess Penrose defect?  _Why_ was the Candy Kingdom at war with the Slime Kingdom, and why was Jugland important?  Why _any_ of this?”

“Och, me lassie,” said Galé, arching an eyebrow.  “I haven’t the foggiest. History was ne’er me richest vein.”

“Well, thanks anyway,” Macy called over her shoulder as she headed out of the room.  So that had been a total bust.

By the time Macy got back to her room, Robin was already there.  “How was your morning?” she asked, walking over to the desk by the far wall.

“Pretty good,” replied Robin.  “Walked around, talked to people, had a brief existential crisis, the works.”

“Sounds like — hup! — like business as usual, then,” grunted Macy as she climbed onto the desk via the chair in front of it.

“The more things change, right?”

With a satisfying thunk, Macy undid the wrought-iron latch on the window and threw it open.  She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, letting the smells of budding snow-flowers take her mind back to the story which the younger of her older brothers had told her.  As she opened her eyes, she turned to face her friend, whirling her body around and carefully dropping to sit on the edge of the desk with her feet on the seat of the chair.  “The more things change what?”

“So _that’s_ what that feels like.”  Robin smirked. “Feels nice.”

“What feels nice?  Robin, you’re not making any sense.”

Robin walked up to Macy and put a paw on her shoulder.  “Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh. Be at peace, my child.”

Macy brushed off Robin’s paw.  “Anyway, my morning was pretty meh.  I don’t think Ambassador Corn likes me very much.”

“Maybe she just likes things to be the way they should be.”

“You mean the way she _thinks_ they should be.”

Robin locked eyes with Macy, mouth flat and eyes focused.  “There is no universe in which you should have been leading that welcoming party.”

Macy threw up her hands in exasperation, standing up on the chair and causing it to wobble slightly.  “There wasn’t enough time for things to be done the way they should have! That wasn’t my fault.”

“It wasn’t her fault, either,” zhe countered.  “Besides, Vesper could have done it, or one of your other siblings.”

Macy thought about that.  “I don’t know that they could have.”

“The ambassador definitely couldn’t have known that, though.  Looking at it from her perspective, her official welcoming into the duchy got hijacked by a twelve-year-old kid.”

“I’m not a kid!” Macy snapped, shaking the back of the chair; it tipped, catching itself on the bottom of the desk before it could fall over, and the nut rolled off and tumbled to the ground, rolling until she came to a rest by Robin’s feet.

“You’re a kid, Macy.”

Macy glanced toward the open window.  “Cheese, I’m really glad I wasn’t standing on the desk just now.”

Robin patted zhir friend’s head as zhe rolled her out the door.  “Come on, now,” zhe cooed, “it’s time for lunch.” Zhe looked down at Macy, who was staring up at her with wide eyes like saucers, and smiled.  “I’ll go with you this time, kid.”

* * *

After an uneventful lunch with most of the family absent and Archie making a show of being unimpressed by Robin’s chromatic cantrips, Macy decided to stop by the embassy to apologize for the state of the reception that morning.  When Robin had asked her why she had changed her mind, she replied that it probably had something to do with the fact that previously she had been “hangry”, a word with which she had fallen in love the first time she heard it in a pre-Mushroom-War sitcom.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she clarified.  “I’m still wheeled at Vesper for statuing me when Corn showed me the thornbush, but at least now I’m not cutting my jeans about the ambassador’s hot pocket.”

“Okay, I _know_ most of those aren’t real sayings,” said Robin, elbowing Macy playfully.

Macy chuckled.  “Maybe.”

“Stop yanking my whiskers.”

“Okay, I’ll settle my shoes.”

“Thank you.”  Robin stopped briefly to give zhir friend a slight bow, complete with obsequious handwringing.

The embassy door was open — whether as a literal manifestation of some open-door policy or simply because whoever had used it last had neglected to close it properly, Macy could only guess — so the two walked right in.  The lobby was far less cluttered than it had been yesterday, during that incident they were trying desperately not to think about; in fact, it seemed suddenly spartan in comparison. Most of the furnishings were gone. There were no more papers over the floor; there were no papers at all that they could see.  A few folding chairs were stacked horizontally against a far wall, a thick black binder across their tops. The air held that peculiar musk which arises after a carpet is vacuumed yet before the room has a chance to aerate. Robin let out a great sneeze, sending a shockwave of rippling colors through her body as her jowls clapped audibly, and then the echoes faded into silence.

A beat.

Macy looked around.  “I guess she’s n—”

“Can I help you?”

Macy wheeled around, so fast that she would have fallen over for the fifth time that day had Robin not caught her just in time.  There, standing suddenly where the two had walked only moments before, was Ambassador Corn, carrying a stack of papers; with the comically-exaggerated scowl that now adorned her face, Macy was suddenly struck by how much she resembled the Colonel from the time she had seen him in person at Castle Bubblegum.  Sure, she was less ancient, and her attire was more business-formal than military, but her eyes held that same spark of war, that same disdain for mundanity and complacency, that Macy had sensed in the garden where she first saw the man she now called her father.

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” said Macy.  “About earlier.”

“Why?” prompted Robin, drawing out the word with a lilting flourish.  The ambassador raised an eyebrow, silently seconding the question.

“Because you deserved a more proper welcoming.  Because I was the wrong person to do it, and I only volunteered because — because I wanted to feel important.”

“Don’t worry,” Robin assured her, giving her a big hug.  “You’re plenty important where it matters. In here.”

“In where?  You didn’t point anywhere.”

“Listen, that’s not what’s important.  _You’re_ what’s important.”

Corn scoffed.  “Kids.” She walked across the room, picking up the black binder atop the folding chairs and snapping the papers into them before turning to face the two again.  She made a point of not using her feet, turning solely by rotating her torso; she couldn’t manage it completely, but she seemed content with only looking at them in side-eye.  “You know, I wasn’t really mad at you for what happened this morning, and I’m sorry if it came across that way,” she said in a tone that didn’t make it seem like she was sorry.

“I get that now,” said Macy.  “I guess you just felt like your time was wasted.”

Corn’s one visible eye widened slightly, and she half-turned, just enough to properly face the marquess.  “Yes, that’s right. We didn’t want to have any delay in re-establishing the continuity between this duchy and the kingdom proper.”

“We?”  Macy tilted her head, and act which for her required bending one knee so her entire body leaned about ten degrees.

Corn nodded.  “The Princess, her advisors, and I.  We figured it best if there not be too much of a chance for anarchy to set in.”

Macy laughed, recalling what had counted as a “wretched hive of scum and villainy” to Cash and extrapolating from that what would count as anarchy.  Then she realized Corn wasn’t smiling. “You weren’t really worried about that happening, were you?”

“It’s always better to be prepared for the worst rather than leave people to their own devices.  _Beobachte deine Freunde, damit ihre Füße nicht auf einen unsichtbaren Ast fallen._ ”  She said that last bit like a particularly talented kindergartener reciting their sole line in a school play.  At least, Macy assumed so, the first Candy Kingdom kindergarten big enough to have a school play having been built well after she would have graduated; the only experience she really had with the subject was from the sitcoms.

Macy had no idea what this phrase meant, but apparently Robin did, for zhe growled in indignation.  “So that’s how the Princess sees it?”

“No, that’s how my uncle sees it.”

Robin went slack-jawed.  “You have an _uncle?_ ”

Corn let out a tiny, closed-mouth chuckle and donned the first partial smile Macy had seen on her the entire day.  “Well, not literally an uncle. But he was brewed from the same stock that was used to produce me, and he’s definitely older than me, so I think of him like an uncle.”

“The colonel,” Macy guessed.

The ambassador clapped her hands quickly, fingers to palm.  “Very good, Marquess; nothing escapes your eye, does it?” Macy fumed.  Candy, either not noticing the girl’s death glare or not caring, picked up the binder and tucked it under her arm.  “Anyway, _he_ believed it best to maintain continuity — _Der König ist tot, es lebe der König_ and all that — and he managed to convince the Princess.  Personally, I’m inclined to trust his judgement.”

Macy knew she shouldn’t have said what she said next.  She knew this was neither the time nor the place, even if such a time and place were to exist.  She knew that it was better to not burn a bridge before you crossed it. Yet more strongly than any of that, she knew that if she _didn’t_ say it, it would feel like she had let a terrible lie go by unchallenged.  Her nut heart pounding in her chest, her head swimming with conflicting thoughts, her throat trying to reach out and strangle her tongue before she could speak, her friend nudging her on the arm in a silent cue to leave, Macy had to close her eyes tightly and shut out the world before she could muster up the resolve to say it.

“You mean the judgement that nearly kept my father from adopting me?”

Time stood still.  Macy didn’t dare to breathe.  Robin, now gripping her shoulder, had gone rigid.  Even the faint sound of rustling wind chimes from the castle garden seemed to mute itself out of respect.  For the second time in two days, Macy was bombarded by a deafening silence.

Then she opened her eyes, only to see that Corn’s expression hadn’t changed at all.  “Yes,” she said without inflection, “because quite frankly I don’t think the man has any business raising children.”  Then she walked into the office where a man had been killed the other day. As she closed the door behind herself, making a show of closing it completely, Macy could see that the plaque already read “CANDICE CORN”.

* * *

A grass dragon — a great green beast furloughs long — soared high over the Mystery Mountains, slowly spiraling down to the Sienna Ridge.  The spring weather brought clouds from the northwest, the highest of which cleared some of the lower peaks before being forcibly dissipated in any of the mountain range’s countless valleys.  The Sienna Ridge, situated on the end of one such valley, was therefore blanketed by its own personal thundercloud. Nobody there would be able to see the dragon or its rider as they approached.

Macy released one of the long ferns she was using as a rein to wipe frost from her makeshift goggles with a handkerchief she kept wrapped around her right wrist.  Being left-handed, she was often frustrated by the fact that many limited-run mass-production clothing items, like the nondescript brown parka she was wearing, had pockets on the left, which was more awkward to reach for; she had taken to storing important items on her right arm as a result.  In addition to the handkerchief, her wrist also held a charm bracelet, a keychain to which her cameraphone was attached, and a first-aid kit tucked up her sleeve. She couldn’t recall when she had started doing this, but it was something she had thought about doing since she was a child, so naturally she must have gotten around to it at some point.

The dragon plowed through the thundercloud; Macy instinctively closed her eyes, bracing for the imminent moistness.  The vapor was cold, and it instantly formed a thin layer of frost on her shell. She felt small balls of hail shatter against her; she smelled an invigorating rush of ozone as the thunderhead brewed a mighty bolt.  A sudden updraft spooked the mount, causing flakes of frost to fly into the air in front of the rider. She accidentally opened her mouth, and a bit of frost entered and landed on her tongue. It tasted sugary.

Then she burst through and saw the entire valley covered in icing.  Instinctively, she nudged the reins on the dragon, guiding it to an encampment on the far side of a ridge.  Before the dragon could touch down, she leapt off, preparing to do a graceful roll on the smooth rock to the applause of the people who would be waiting when she landed.  Instead she landed on her face; behind her, she heard the grass dragon slam into the side of a mountain and become buried in an avalanche of icing.

“Most impressive,” said an unnaturally deep voice as its speaker, a dark chocolate chip in an oversized white cloak, helped her up.  “For a weiner.”

Macy was about to say something in retort, but the Chipolina-Vesper hybrid —  _Chester_ , Macy convinced herself she had always known — was already standing in a line with the others.  There was a chocolate chip cookie with no chips, sporting a black-and-white dress and a bionic eye —  _Ginny_ .  There was a decrepit candy corn woman with a suit and tie made of solid gold —  _Cornwall_ .  Lastly, there was a short green humanoid child —  _Lil’ Bush_ — cradled in the arms of a pink-skinned man in regal attire.

“How goes the scouting mission?” asked the pink-skinned man.

“Not well,” answer Macy grimly.  She pulled out a notebook from a pack slung across her back and flipped through it.  “I was able to glean a lot of information, but none of it was what we wanted. We’ll need to put the pieces together ourselves, and that leaves a lot of room for error.  Is it too much to ask for some certainty?”

“Well, yes.”  His reply wasn’t blunt; he seemed to think he was answering a genuine question.  “We have no idea how any of this will turn out.”

“You’re a real ray of sunshine, Prince Gumball.”  She turned to address Cornwall. “What are your thoughts?”

“I don’t have to tell you anything, newbie.”  Now _that_ was blunt.

“Look, it’s fine if you don’t like me—”

“No it’s not!” called Robin as zhe burst out from under the icing pile where the grass dragon had crashed.  Zhe ran over to Macy. “It’s not okay, because your reason for not liking her is garbage!”

Cornwall grimaced.  “Macy, could you please control your pet?”  But judging by the glare Chester gave her, that was an unpopular move.

Robin turned to Macy, and as zhe did so, the landscape around them began to break down into shapes and colors, shifting from auburn and grey to brown and green.  “I’m sorry, Macy,” said Robin. “You were right about the ambassador all along, and I shouldn’t have doubted you.”

“No, you were right, too,” Macy forced herself to say.  She wanted to accept Robin’s apology unconditionally, and she might have if she were twelve, but she had to be older than that by now if she rode a dragon.  She needed to act more mature, and maybe by doing so she would achieve maturity. “If I had disliked her for the wrong reason, that would have been bad.” She wasn’t so mature as to actually _know_ why it was bad, but that would probably come later.

Then the scene around her finished reassembling itself into a visage of her bedroom at Castle Jugland.  It was just as she remembered it, with the kabbalist golem of clothes and hangers guarding the door vigilantly, a rapier in its hand.  She leapt onto the bed, hearing that satisfying creak she was so familiar with. She looked at the desk by the window, completely empty because the only thing she ever kept on it — the two-dollar coin — hung on her neck, a wire necklace strung through it.  She rubbed it for good luck.

Her eyes unwillingly focused on a corner of the desk.  There was something else that was supposed to be there.  Something important. She closed her eyes, trying to concentrate.  Why wouldn’t it come to her? As she opened them back up, she expected it to have appeared there, but instead the room had disappeared entirely; she now sat on the bench in the castle garden, feeding the birds with her mother the Duchess Integra of Nuts.

Suddenly a courier ran up to them, bearing a letter.  “It’s for the Marquess,” he said, handing it to Macy. She turned the envelope over in her hands; before she could read the return address, a stray autumn leaf landed on it, covering it up.  She blew it off.

The instant she read that address, the whole universe disappeared except for her and the letter.  Actually, it was more like she and the letter had disappeared; she wasn’t sure how she could tell the difference.  As she turned around, she noticed that the courier hadn’t disappeared either; he — zhe — was slowly morphing back into Robin.  Macy looked back at the letter, and saw that it was addressed form the Candy Orphanage, with the name “Masse Yvoire” written on the byline in his distinctive, ornate cursive.

She gripped it tightly, feeling the paper bunch between her fingers like linen, and awoke.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Believe it or not, this chapter was by far the fastest to write, clocking in at almost exactly two weeks. This was due in large part to the flashback that comprised about 25% of its length, the entirety of which I wrote over the course of two days. I don't know why, I just found it easy to write; I never got stuck on what was to happen next except briefly, and even the humor, which I often find hardest to inject, came naturally. Either that or I'm just hitting my stride.
> 
> The funny thing is I expected this chapter to be a lot trickier to write, for a reason you can probably guess: It's not very structured. There's a vague hint of a plot — over the course of a day, Macy learns about her new home, her family, and the history she's now a part of, all colored through the lens of Candice Corn's arrival and the way that character disturbs the existing dynamic — but there's no driving conflict, since what conflicts do exist are regimented and used to reflect on the theme rather than drive it. I personally don't view this as an inherent problem — A Place Further than the Universe is my favorite anime of all time and quite a few of its episodes are unstructured and conflict-light, since the hyperfocus on conflict as driving a story is actually a fairly Western concept — but as I got closer to having to write it I was getting the jitters. As a result, this is one of the more pants-y episodes I've written.
> 
> As far as specifics go, I obviously need to talk about the flashback. But I won't, because we're going to return to those events in more detail later. For now, all I'll say is that there's totally a justification for Gumbella, she's one of the people pictured on Princess Bubblegum's wall in “The Duke”, neener neener! Also, expect to see more of the Goblin Kingdom at some point.
> 
> Just like Pen is the Marquis of Nuts featured in The Duke, Galé is “the Duke's second son” depicted in Henchmen. The other members of the Duke's family (aside from his wife) I made up whole cloth. I wanted to have some variety in the personality types that inhabit the castle, so I made it happen. I am a wizard. Fear my power.
> 
> I swear I didn't intend on Helix and Jeff returning in the next chapter, or even on Jeff returning at all. I just needed something for Robin to do as a sort of intermission for the flashback, as well as a sounding board or two for zhir little micro-identity crisis. I don't think zhe'll be allowed back in the Gusty Goat. And yes, the name of the bar is in fact a fart joke.
> 
> This chapter attempts to make up for the last one's dearth of Macy dreams. In fact, you could consider the whole of the flashback to be a Macy “dream,” or even two if you want to lie. Don't strain yourself trying to work out all of the symbolism in the dreams; a lot of it is deliberately abstract or meaningless, more important for its emotional meaning than any symbolic value. Still, there is quite a bit of foreshadowing going on in addition to exploring Macy's complex mental state, and I'd love to see some entertainingly wrong guesses about what it means.
> 
> The next chapter will kick off the first 8-parter in the series, _Flight of Fancy_. What does that mean? As if I'd tell you that now. It'll be clear once that chapter is released. Speaking of that chapter, it's actually done! That's right, I finally have a chapter-long buffer. Can't wait to squander it.
> 
> And now, as is customary, a sneak peak of said chapter:  
> “In my defense, I never claimed _not_ to be a hypocrite.”


	4. Shell Games

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Robin the Rainicorn-Dog discovers a dark secret that threatens to spark conflict in Castle Jugland of the Duchy of Nuts.
> 
> “Flight of Fancy” part 1 of 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're in it now, folks! The first “eight-parter” of the story is beginning with this chapter. As such, I've decided to do my best to make this chapter a reasonable jumping-on point for new readers who want to dive right into the meat of things without covering the first 36000 words of buildup. All the important character relationships are reestablished, key character traits are highlighted, and while we're definitely pulling on existing plot threads here, I do my best to explain what needs explaining. In theory it should be like starting a story in medias res, but specifically the kind where you don't go back and see what medias has been rezzed because it was just there to kick off the events of the plot. I'm going to try to have “beginner-friendly” chapters like this every once in a while — both for the benefit of new readers and to jog the memory of old ones — because have I mentioned this is going to be a long story? so I want it to be as accessible as possible. I started following some of my favorite stories by jumping on halfway through and I want others to be able to have that same experience.
> 
> To be honest, it's less of an eight-parter and more of a series of episodes slightly more tightly-bound by a single contiguous thread than the previous three have been. Still, it's safe to say that by the end of this chapter, gears will officially be turning. We've now reached the point where not everything in the story is simply groundwork for things that are coming later. After 36000 words of setup, stuff is going to start paying off. Granted, it'll pay off in ways that are designed to set up more stuff for the future, but this is a longfic so that kinda comes with the territory.
> 
> I don't want to say too much about the throughline that ties together this eight-chapter arc just yet. In a lot of ways, this chapter isn't really a part of the story told by the other seven so much as it is setup _for_ that story. That's not a completely fair characterization, but I'll talk more about that when the whole thing's done. Also, don't worry about the fact that I called this chapter setup right after saying it's where I start paying things off. It's fine. It's all fine. We're all fine here, how are you?
> 
> I will say that this is a chapter whose title I had picked out well in advance, as will the next chapter. I mean, the original title for this chapter was “Nuts!”, but then I came up with this one and thank goodness for that.

Robin V. wandered through the dark hallways of Castle Jugland.  Zhe could barely see two meters in front of zhir face, but having lived here for a week, zhe was already capable of navigating by memory alone.  Zhe placed zhir paws trepidatiously, in part because the fragile near-silence of the plateau at night seemed precious, something whose destruction would be equivalent to the desecration of a priceless painting.  There was of course the chirping of nocturnal birds and a quiet rustle of wind through chimes, but this high up both of those sounds were much quieter than what Robin was accustomed to. Other than that, only a quiet snoring from one of the bedrooms behind zhir belied the presence of a world beyond this empty hall.

The other reason Robin tread carefully was the same reason zhe was skulking around in the middle of the night.  Zhe wasn’t sure what it was, exactly, zhe had seen sneaking into the castle that evening shortly after sunset, but zhe didn’t want to be the rainicorn-dog who cried why-wolf, so zhe had pursued the figure from a distance for a while; eventually, however, zhe had been distracted by a penny dropped on the ground, and when zhe looked up, the figure was gone.  Now zhe was tracing a path zhe guessed the dark-cloaked interloper may have taken, letting fortune be zhir guide.

At the end of the hallway zhe faced a fork in the hallway. Here zhe had to make a decision, and zhe knew that if zhe chose wrong, their prey would most likely evade detection altogether. That would not do. Quickly, zhe tried to recall the layout of the castle. Down the left hallway was a spiral staircase leading back down to the first level of the castle — a bizarre choice ‘twould be, seeing as the figure had started on ground level — to the most heavily guarded region aside from the duke’s bedchamber, namely the barracks and guard station. Down the right were some servant’s quarters and supply closets, but past those one would eventually arrive at a balcony directly above the castle’s temple to Grob Gob Glob Grod, which prominently displayed a triptych by the famous Gardenite painter Cilantro. Robin didn’t ‘get it’, but according to Vesper it was “a priceless masterpiece of post-impressionist shapism which brilliantly blends Vectorian geometric determinism with traditional Martian eschatological iconography.” Robin had agreed more with Macy’s interpretation, which was “a bunch of squiggles and boxes;” still, Vesper spoke like they knew what they were talking about, so there were probably a lot of people who would consider it valuable.

Nevertheless, Robin chose the left path.

Not long after zhe descended the spiral staircase, zhe spotted a guard patrolling the hallway ahead, and for a moment zhe was afraid this whole excursion would turn out to have been a bust.  Then zhe noticed a faint light coming from under a door in front of her labeled “Lieutenant’s Office”, along with hushed murmurs and the faint smell of candle-wax. Thinking quickly, zhe flattened zhirself against the door so that the guard wouldn’t see zhir, then squeezed through the bottom of the door, shrinking zhir proportions just enough to fit.

“… _ sure _ nobody followed you,” a guard sitting behind a desk was whispering, “then I can tell you what I’ve learned.”  His desk was large, polished, and as decorated with medals as the seafoam-green walls were with framed awards and photographs.  The swivel chair on which the guard sat matched the room in a way that the folding chair the cloaked figure Robin had been chasing now sat on — identical to every other folding chair on and around the castle grounds — did not.  Robin read one of the papers on the wall, a framed certificate of an award of “Valiant Service to the Realm” from the Duke, made out to “the valiant second in command of the Nut Guard, Peter Stachio.” The word “second” was slightly smudged, as if someone had covered it with their thumb when the ink was still dry.

The cloaked figure, sitting in the folding chair facing the lieutenant — Robin elected to call them ‘Shadow’, since zhe had to call them  _ something  _ — merely nodded.

“Alright, alright,” whispered Peter; he paused briefly to collect his thoughts, closing his eyes as he did a short breathing exercise, then continued at a more normal volume, albeit quickly.  “Legally, I should preface all of this by saying that since we lack any hard evidence or affidavits, a lot of this is speculation, but I won’t insult your intelligence by presuming you’d underestimate mine.  I’m as certain of this as you are that the sun will rise.”

A palm reached out from under Shadow’s cloak and rapped the table three times in rapid succession

“Alright, alright,” said Peter, waving his hand in a jocular reproduction of bashfulness that seemed incongruous with the conspiratorial tableau he occupied.  “I know how much dallying by the rosebushes yanks your whiskers, so I’ll skip to the skedaddle: Our good Captain, Amélie Faucher, was  _ not _ involved in the ill-conceived pudding heist.”

Shadow crossed their arms, clearly disappointed by this news.

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” said Peter, putting his hands up and nodding in sympathy.  “Not what you wanted to hear. Big whoop. Here’s where things get interesting though.  Faucher  _ was _ leaking info to old Ambassador Palmerson — Glob rest his soul — but there was a limit to how far she was willing to go, and apparently this entire heist was put in place to circumvent that limit.  The best part is, apparently Palmerson blabbed about it to our culprit, Bandit Princess. She’s willing to sign that oh-so-valuable affidavit for the right incentive.”

Shadow leaned back in their chair, possibly so they could more easily tilt their head in a manner which would allow them to look down on the lieutenant.

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” laughed Peter, tapping a finger to his head as Shadow sat back upright.  “I don’t believe it either. Blondie was always too careful. But still, you know it’s true, and I know it’s true, so why should it matter whether the fine gentlelady with a signature on the affidavit knows it’s true?”

A small, uncomfortable silence hung in the air like dirty laundry; Robin felt blood rushing to zhir cheeks, as if zhe were playing witness to some act of bawdy perversion rather than of political intrigue.  Then Shadow lifted their palm and rubbed their fingers together, tented upward.

“The price?”  Peter spun around once on his swivel chair as if this part of the conversation could not hold his attention.  Facing directly away from the door, he leaned backward to stare at Shadow, a too-big smile on his face. “You already know that one.  Same thing she always wanted. Total amnesty.”

“Pay it.” Shadow’s voice came out quick and bitter, at once reluctant and impatient to leave their lips. No, not their — his. For in that moment when Shadow first spoke, Robin instantly recognized that voice. It was a voice zhe had known longer than zhe had lived here, a voice belonging to someone who had every right to be here, a voice Robin had already grown to dislike and, amidst zhir panic, was perversely glad zhe finally had a justification for.

It was the voice of Penhaligon Jugland, marquess in waiting of the Duchy of Nuts, and Robin’s best friend’s elder brother.

* * *

Macadamia the Nut, Robin’s best friend, awoke just as the first beams of the coward’s sunrise crested the eastward mountains and alighted on her rested face. The wash of gold was not unpleasant, as a light to the eyes ought to be; filtered through the hue-shifting atmospheric dust that lent it its auburn tone, and then further by the imperfections in the window that took up most of one wall of her bedroom in Castle Jugland, it was gentle and inviting, a tinge of warmth in the cool spring morning air. As she sat up, blinking flakes of vivid dreamscape from her eyes, and climbed out of bed, she made sure to disturb the navy blue linens as little as possible, so as to preserve their smooth softness for when they would next call her into their gentle embrace. She shivered as she slid out of the cocoon of warmth and into the brisk air of reality. She shivered a second time as she climbed atop the desk facing the great window and threw said window open, inviting a chilly breeze ripe with the smell of hatchling corvids from the garden below. She shivered once more as she brushed her teeth and buffed her shell, the cold water bringing her still-dreaming mind down to Ooo.

It was after this third shiver passed that she realized she had been anticipating it. For the first time, her morning routine felt like a routine — intimately familiar, each moment inviting her forward in time like an old friend. She went to her familiar closet and pulled out some familiar clothes, deciding what outfit she should wear today; as with all six days before, she decided on familiar nothing and hung her clothes back up. She pulled out the familiar chair by her familiar desk, grasped the familiar purple two-dollar coin in her hand, and gazed through its familiar pentagonal hole at the familiar green walls. The narrowed view of the walls’ subtle tessellated floral silhouette, bounded by such a strange polygon, caused it to take on a new dimension, randomness seemingly being introduced where there was none before. It seemed more hectic this way, more like how flowers might grow in an untamed jungle rather than a tended garden.

Then, to complete the routine, she put down the coin and stared at the unopened periwinkle envelope on the corner of the desk, reaching and retracting her hand as if afraid it might lash out were she to get too close.   _ Tomorrow _ , she told herself for the fourteenth day in a row.  Each time she meant it sincerely. It had been fourteen days since she last talked to the person who had written this letter — seven days in the Candy Kingdom and on the road, seven days in the Duchy of Nuts — and over the course of that fortnight her sentiments had mutated from bitterness to trepidation to nervous curiosity, until it settled on a self-feeding guilt.

Macy shook her head, which is to say she shook her entire body, as if erasing an etch-a-sketch.  She couldn’t think like that now; there was breakfast to be consumed.

As if on cue, her father the Duke and Lisby the butler walked past her bedroom door, talking about the upcoming breakfast in a stage whisper so as not to wake anyone who might still be sleeping.  Their conversation was banal — confirming that today was indeed omelette day, asking about who was up already and who was still sleeping — but the hushed tones made it seem almost conspiratorial. The idea of dark doings happening within Castle Jugland was so ridiculous that Macy had to stifle a giggle.

“Oh!” exclaimed the Duke, making a quarter-turn on his heel to face Macy.  “I hadn’t realized you were awake.”

“Course I’m up,” she said as she joined the two of them in their trek down the hallway, tossing her coin back onto her desk with practiced precision.  “The sun’s up. It’s time for a brand new adventure!” She pumped her fist in the air as she whisper-shouted the last sentence.

“Yes, adventure,” echoed the Duke nervously, glancing left and right as if adventure could be just around the corner, waiting to leap out and scare him.  Macy one more struggled to suppress laughter.

As they walked through the halls, going wherever the two had been going before Macy joined them, they talked about all kinds of mundanities — who likes what kind of cheese (the Duke was partial to cheddar), how everyone had slept (Lisby’s arm was still buzzing from resting on it all night), what song the faint discord of wind chimes from the castle reminded them of (Macy recalled a Crystal Dimension folk song Robin had taught her).  All of that was fine and good until Lisby, in that goofy voice that Macy still couldn’t quite take seriously, asked a question she should have been expecting at some point but hadn’t.

“When are you starting school?”

Macy stopped in her tracks.  She was standing in front of a classroom filled with candies, one of the three non-candies in her class.  Today was the day she was supposed to present her big essay on who her role model was. After scrapping several drafts about Robin and Princeso, she had finally settled on one about Finn Mertens, the One-Handed Hero.  She had spent countless dozens of minutes poring through the extensive histories when Princeso had taken the orphans to the library; she had even browsed the grown-up section in her search for sources. After compiling all of this together, she had constructed an oral essay worthy of the princess of all fifth-graders; she had rehearsed it over and over in front of the mirror in her shared bedroom, making sure she got every inflection just right to the best judgement of her subpar hearing.  Now the day had finally arrived when she would present her magnum opus, yet no words could escape her lips.

She had taken one look at the crowd of peers before her, staring at her with those blank, bored expressions, and she thought them zombies.  She knew of zombies from the histories; Finn had fought zombified candy folk on more than one occasion, back when he was not much more than her age.  In one instance he had found himself cornered, pressed into a situation where he could not perform the heroics he so often practiced; he was out of weapons, and his friends had all turned on him.  In a moment of self-sacrifice, he doused himself in antidote and threw himself recklessly to the crowd, letting them tear into him mercilessly until they had all absorbed the antidote through their attacks.  Could she ever be so brave? If pressed, could she truly step into a situation where everyone would attack her without thought of mercy?

She was too busy thinking about the content of her essay to actually recite it.

After that, the school board was finally forced to admit that her hallucinations presented an obstacle to her education.  She was made to work with a counselor for the rest of the semester, a sweet old lady who always made Macy feel better about herself but who didn’t help much with her actual performance in school.  From then on, Princeso had worked with a series of tutors to homeschool Macy himself; she suspected he was learning as much from the curriculum as she was, but he helped to explain things to her anyway, and when she zoned out around him, she never felt ashamed.

“…month, but I’ll need to ask Princess Cookie if that’s enough,” her dad was saying back in the real world.  They had walked several yards down the hallway in the time since Macy had frozen. “Either way, I’ll be taking little Macadamia to decide on a tutor some time next week.”  He turned to where Macy would have been had she kept walking, then stared at the empty space as he clutched his head in distress.

“She’s back there,” said Lisby.

The Duke ran to his daughter and hugged her tightly.  “Are you okay?” he asked, like he did every time, holding her face and staring into her eyes.

“I’m fine,” she answered, like she did every time.  She felt embarrassed at the attention, but more so by the fact that she enjoyed it.

Her dad studied her face for a few moments, searching for a more honest answer written in its expression than could be heard from her lips.  Eventually, he seemed to settle on the conclusion that she was indeed fine, at least for now, so he took her hand and continued walking. “I know you’ve had some bad experiences with school in the past,” he said, “but I will do everything in my not-insignificant power to make sure that you have the resources you need to succeed.”

After a few more minutes of walking, Macy heard frantic footfalls behind her; she and her dad whirled around at the same time in opposite directions, almost throwing out each others’ arms but managing to steady each other.  They saw approaching them a tired, frizz-frazzled Robin, zhir unmorphed body dragging against the floor with a bizarre, high-pitched whine.

“Macy!” panted Robin, before zhe looked up at the Duke and the butler.  “Good morning!” Zhir tone was suddenly chipper, a too-wide smile plastered on zhir face.

“Hi, Robin,” said Macy, waving her hand in a half-circle like an upper-class teen girl in a pre-Mushroom-War sitcom.  “You didn’t climb into my room through the window as soon as I woke up this morning. Have you actually been getting sleep for once?”

Robin brushed aside the rhetorical question.  “We need to talk later,” zhe said, as if this explained anything.  “Hey, Mr. The Duke.”

“Oh, you don’t have to address me by my title,” assured Mr. The Duke.  “Please, call me—”

“Oi, Lisby!” called a voice from the other end of the hallway.  This voice was unmistakable — the Duke’s second son Galé was probably the only person in all of Ooo who spoke in that particular gruff brogue.  Macy had once made the mistake of asking where he had acquired it; his response had been sixty seconds of asphyxiating laughter followed by a full-on existential crisis, while cousin Vesper (apparently drawn to the room by the smell of infuriating vagaries) mumbled something incomprehensible about “ghosts of Cúige Uladh” and “the fire of fifty days”.

“Yes, Master Chesterfield?” called Lisby.

Galé held up a large history textbook whose spine appeared to suffer from severe scoliosis.  “D’ye know where tha splints’re?”

“Of course!” replied the butler too brightly.  “Follow me!” And he led the older marquess away.

* * *

Breakfast was quiet that morning.  The Duchess, Archie, and Vesper were all absent — the Duchess for some manner of negotiation, Archie at an overnight study party which Macy suspected did not involve much studying, and Vesper off doing unknown Vesper-like things.  Galé was presumably still fixing up his textbook with Lisby, so he too was not present. Pen looked worried about something, and Robin looked worried about Pen, so neither of them talked much; Macy, in turn, was worried about Robin and repeatedly tried to get zhir to open up, to no avail.  Only the Duke was present and willing to talk, but since but since holding a conversation with only one participant is difficult, and perhaps more importantly impolite, even he remained taciturn.

“Mmmm, these omelettes are tasty!”  said Macy, looking around.  “My compliments to the chef.”  The Duke nodded in agreement. And then there was silence.

“Hey, Macy, you haven’t met my wife and kid yet, have you?” asked Pen.  “They’ve been out of town on business, but when they come back you should come on over and—”  Robin cut Pen off with a growl. And then there was silence.

“So nobody knows where Vesper is?”  The Duke’s question was met with shaking heads around the room.  “I do declare, that nibling of mine is too difficult to get ahold of.  I worry that they lack a real sense of connection with us; I should have a talk with them about getting lost in their occult studies.”  And then there was silence.

After all that nothing took place, Robin gestured for Macy to follow her out of the castle.  Robin usually took walks in the morning, both back in the Candy Kingdom and now that zhe had relocated here to follow Macy, but zhe had always done so alone.  Macy was too relieved at Robin breaking zhir reticence to question this, however, so the two headed out the front gate and into the town proper.

As soon as zhe was clear of the gate, Robin hissed to Macy.  “We need to talk about Penhaligon.”

Macy grimaced.  “Look, I know you don’t like him, but you’re really shifting the blame for that incident onto the wrong party.”

“Oh, so  _ now _ you want to— look, this isn’t about that.”  Zhe paused briefly, glancing up with her ruby eyes as if the clouds in the sky were where her thoughts were stored.  The concept of storing information in a cloud was ridiculous, of course, but not every metaphor can make sense.  “Okay, I guess it kind of is about that,” zhe admitted.  “But hear me out!”

“I’ll humor you.”  Macy ruffled the rainicorn-dogs neck.  “What did he do this time? Did he take the last mashed potatoes?”

“I’m telling you, he did that to spite me!”

“Did he go on a tirade about how cruel the faultless Princess Bubblegum is?”

“Hey, I never said she was faultless!”

Macy leaned down to whisper in zhir ear.  “Did he use the wrong pronouns to refer to you?”

Robin recoiled.  “What? No, of course not.  He may be a dillweed, but he’s not totally insensitive.”

“Then what?”

Robin took a long breath in, eyes closed, then blurted out, “I overheard Pen conspiring with one of the guards to try and get rid of Captain Mél!”

A beat.  “Who’s Captain Mél?” asked Macy.

Robin blinked.  “You don’t remember Captain Mél?  She was the guard captain who kept disagreeing with Pen on the day of the — of the theft.  Talked really formally? Had a scythe?”

She shook her head.  “Doesn’t ring a chime, sorry.”

“Fleas and lice, Macy, how can you not remember her?  She was the one who busted Blondie’s door down!”

Macy stopped walking for a moment, running through that day’s events in her head.  “Was she the one who wore green?”

“I don’t know, I never checked.  That’s not the point. The point is, Pen’s a bad dude.”

“Right, right.”  Macy didn’t sound convinced as she resumed walking.  “What did he say that makes you think he was conspiring against her?”

“He was going to let Bandit Princess go in order to create evidence that Mél was secretly working with Blondie to steal state secrets.”

“ _ Was _ she?”

“They seemed to think so,” Robin admitted.

“Then doesn’t that mean Mél is the one who’s conspiring or whatever?”

Zhe put zhir paw to zhir temple and sighed.  “Look, I’m not explaining this well.”

“All I’m saying is, maybe you found a situation that could be read either way and you  _ chose _ to read it in a way which confirmed your anti-Pen biases.”

Zhe pursed zhir lips.  “Maybe.”

“So let’s go talk to her.”

Zhe stopped short.  “What do you mean?” zhe asked, turning zhir long neck around in an unnecessary double-corkscrew.

She smirked.  “Captain Mél. Let’s go talk to her and figure out what’s going on.”  A beat. “You’ll have to point her out to me, though, because I have no idea what she looks like.”

* * *

Amélie Faucher, Captain of the Nut Guard and Principal Protector of Duke Jugland of the Sienna Ridge and the Valley of Moths, snored like a wild boar.  She lay slumped in her swivel chair behind a desk stacked with a mountain range of papers, half-sorted into piles and half-strewn about haphazardly. There might once have been personal items which would lend a clue as to the personality of this cubicle’s occupant, knickknacks or photographs or ornaments which could act as gateways to the innermost self, but the room was in such disarray that to distinguish them from the general maelstrom of clutter would be impossible.  Two folding chairs with cheap cushions taped to their seats lay akimbo on the floor opposite the guard captain. And yes, her wrinkled, ink-stained, sweat-pungent uniform was green.

Macy and Robin entered the room, panting.  “We…  _ (gasp) _ …didn’t need to…  _ (gasp) _ …run all this way,” wheezed the rainicorn-dog, zhir normally bright color pallet reduced to shades of beige and taupe.

“Sorry,” gasped the thick-shelled macadamia, stopped over on her thin, wobbling legs.  “Got excited. ‘Ll never happen again.”

They stared at the guard captain for five whole minutes, too tired to realize that she was asleep.

“Wow,” whispered Robin.  “I didn’t get this level of intimidating silence from her before.  She’s tough stuff.”

Captain Faucher snorted in her sleep, popping a snot bubble.

“Whoa,” Macy whispered back.  “I want to be just like her someday.”

“Didn’t you want to be just like that detective Cash Daniels all of five minutes ago?”

“Oh, right.”  Macy pulled out a plastic straw with the label for the McMmmmmm’s fast-food restaurant chain emblazoned on it; she stuck it in her mouth, paper wrapping still on it, and Robin focused zhir magic to create a faint red glow at the end.  “Captain Falcon,” she muttered loudly, nasalizing her vowels in order to pronounce them with the object in her mouth.

This startled the guard captain awake.  “Wha-who-wha-hello, Sir Madame Miss Marquess Jugland Macadamia,” she stammered.  Even her stammers sounded measured and deliberate — there was an unwavering confidence in her delivery, seemingly baked into her very soul.

“The name’s Mac Juggles,” said the marquess coolly.  A beat. “But you can call me Macy, and never ‘Mac Juggles’, because I just decided that’s actually terrible.”  She sounded like how the early twenty-first century would imagine an early twentieth-century radio announcer.

“Yes, very how can I help you good?”  As Faucher said this, she blinked, but other than that no part of her expression seemed to reflect the oddness of her phrasing.

“I’m here to see a man about some pudding.”  The straw dropped out of Macy’s mouth halfway through the line; Robin, who had compressed zhirself to fit into the room, stretched enough to catch it before it hit the floor and put it back in zhir friend’s mouth, wet end out.

Faucher shook her head rapidly as if to disperse a cloud in her head.  “What do you mean?”

Robin stepped forward at this point, placing a paw on Macy’s lips to halt her reply.  “Listen, we just want to know why Pen wants to frame you for selling information to Blondie.”

At that the guard captain slammed her fists on the table, suddenly annoyed; her hands slid a little on impact, sending some papers tumbling onto the floor with a loud ruffling sound.  “I have never ‘sold information’, I’ll have you know! Frankly, these wild accusations are getting old, and anyone who spends more than a second believing them is a fool who’s more interested in stirring up intrigue for the sake of their own petty grudges and private power struggles than anything concerning the actual security of the duchy.”

“No, no, no, we believe you,” Macy half-lied, still in her hard-boiled detective voice.  “We just want to know why Pen doesn’t.”

“Because… I really shouldn’t tell you this.”

“Tell me!”  The affect was gone from Macy’s voice now.

“Because I had an affair with Blondie.”

Robin gaped, reflexively releasing zhir shrinkage and colliding with every wall in sight at once.  Macy merely stood still, tilting her head by bending her knee. “What’s an affair?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” Faucher and Robin said simultaneously.

“So what does this mean for the reason we came here?”

Robin shrank back to zhir typical inside proportions, massaging zhir head and sides where they had impacted the walls.  “I hate to say it, but I may have overreacted about Pen. At the very least, he had an understandable reason to  _ think _ Faucher was selling us out, even if she actually wasn’t.”

“Which I wasn’t,” Faucher added indignantly.

Macy spat the straw into her hand.  “Bleh. This was a terrible idea.”  She turned around to wave to the captain.  “Anyway, thanks, and sorry for wasting your—”

Just then a messenger, the same one who had delivered the notice of Ambassador Corn’s arrival, ran into the room, knocking Macy over so that she rolled into the wall.  “—rtimewhattheglob!”

“Captain Faucher!” said the messenger, saluting.  “I’ve just received word that one of the prisoners has been released!”

Faucher slammed her hands on the table again; she recoiled, her wrists obviously sore from last time.  “Who?” she winced.

“Bandit Princess!”

* * *

Despite everything, Macy was excited as she raced through the halls after Faucher and Robin.  She was going on an adventure! The thought should have scared her, given how her previous adventure a week ago had ended, but she was too young and optimistic to see that as a portend of things to come.  Whether this was optimism or naiveté would be for the fates to decide.

After a turn, they unexpectedly joined up with an unexpected pair — Vesper, leading renowned jewel thief Penelope Farthington forward by cuffed hands.  Vesper was so pleased with themself that Macy could almost hear their smile through their drawn white cloak, and Macy had  _ terrible _ hearing.

“I caught this one trying to steal the Eye of Perseus,” said Vesper.  “I came to drop her off at the holding cells.”

“You’re not a constable, you can’t—”  Faucher sighed. “I’ll take her from here.”  She took out a pair of manacles from a pocket on her chest and cuffed herself to Penelope’s cuffs as Vesper slinked into the shadows.  Macy would have to ask them sometime how they were so stealthy while wearing all white.

The party of now four finally reached the holding cells, where indeed Bandit Princess was now gone; without being prompted, Penelope walked into the empty cell and closed the door behind her.

“I’ll get out eventually,” Penelope promised as Faucher grabbed a keyring from the wall, unlocked both sets of handcuffs, and locked the door.  She didn’t acknowledge the master thief’s comments as she hung the keyring back up and stormed over to where a guard was stationed in a windowed room looking out at the holding cells.

Macy watched her go, then turned to face Penelope. The peach-skinned humanoid seemed a lot less intimidating now than when Cash Daniels had brought Macy to her temporary lair and engaged in a bizarre hateflirting ritual with the femme fatale. “So. How’re things?”

Penelope gestured to the cell bars. “Could be better, but I suppose I can’t complain. This is the risk people like myself take, and I doubt I’ll have to wait long before my loyal minion Izak shows up.”

“Right, of course.”

A beat.

“How about you?” asked Penelope.  “I heard about what you witnessed later that day.”

“How?”

“Spies.”

“Ah.”  Macy took a deep breath, stared at the corner of Penelope’s cell for a half-second too long, then finally spoke.  “Honestly, I wish—”

There was a jarring bang as Mél Faucher threw the door to the guard booth open so hard it rebounded against the wall; she had to throw herself to the side just to dodge its return as it slammed itself shut behind her.

“That snake!” she shouted as she stomped toward Macy and Robin.  “That sniveling, conniving, underhanded gator of a guard!”

“Who?” asked Robin.

She kicked the narrow portion of wall which held the keys to Penelope’s cell, setting them a-jingling; she then took a ragged breath in as she clutched her foot, leaning against the wall for support.  “Lieutenant Stachio,” she said at last. “My former partner. We started out—”

“Bup-bup-pub.”  Robin put zhir paw on the guard captain’s lips; seeing how ridiculous this looked from the outside for once, Macy had to hold in a giggle.  “Listen, I just want to know if this means I was right about Pen being a total green-knight. I can’t keep track of the backstories of like twenty different people; I can barely keep track of my own.”

Faucher fixed Robin with a stern glare; Robin matched it.  There was a solid minute of staring between them, from which Macy and Penelope could not look away.  Their mutual transfixion was transfixing.

“…fine.”  Faucher looked away, ear-slits burning.  Today was not her day. “He had acquired a ducal stamp of approval for the release of the prisoner, which given the limited pool of candidates almost certainly came from Sir The Marquess Penhaligon.”

Robin turned to Macy and stuck out zhir tongue; Macy swatted the air between them as if trying to squash a bug which might be recording their conversation for its nefarious insect overlords.

“Well then,” said Macadamia, “let’s go… uh… that is to say…”

Faucher sighed.  “I’ll go confront my subordinate; you go let your father know your suspicions.”

“What about me?” asked Robin.

Another sigh.  “You just stand in the corner and think about how right you are.”

“I was planning on doing that anyway.”  Zhe shrunk zhir body down, grew a few extra arms for good measure, and started meditating, zhir normally-striped body’s colors blending into a smooth gradient.

Macy and Faucher went in different directions; their footsteps soon faded into silence.  After a moment, Robin slid open her eyes, making sure Faucher wasn’t in sight, and then followed after Macy.

Penelope reached a slender arm between the bars, fumbling for the keys, but a white-robed arm reached out from the shadows and batted her hand away with a newspaper.  The thief crossed her arms and pouted. “Spoilsport.”

* * *

The Duke was in his counting-house, counting out his money.  He normally employed an accountant, but they had requested a short leave of absence after the murder of Ambassador Palmerson, so the Duke himself had agreed to cover for them.  In addition to bureaucratic expenditures relating to the instatement of a new ambassador and school fees for Macy, several trade agreements were being renegotiated, and many aspects of the duchy’s internal affairs were facing restructuring after the drop in confidence which had inevitably resulted from the death of a major official.  Right now, the frizz-frazzled duke, wearing a starched white shirt and baseball cap rather than his usual purple robes and hat, was tallying up industrial taxes. If they weren’t enough to cover the discretionary budget, he might have to accept a research investment from IcyU that would let them increase operations on the Sienna mines in exchange for a larger stake in resources recovered than he wanted to release.  On the other hand, accepting the deal would strengthen their relationship with the Ice Kingdom; despite Candy Kingdom protectorates having standing orders to improve relations with the other three great kingdoms, most efforts for the past few decades had instead focused on rebuilding after GOLB’s chaotic onslaught, so such an overture could ingratiate the prickly new ambassador.

“Hey Dad,” said Macy as she walked through the open door.  “You busy doing boring stuff nobody cares about?”

“Macy!” Robin chastised.  “Don’t be rude. I’m sure there are  _ plenty _ of boring people who care about this stuff.”

“You’re right; I should be more sensitive.”  She walked out of the room and then back in. “Hey Dad.  You boring?”

The Duke sighed heavily, wrote down his current count on a piece of paper, and then looked up, his face all cheer.  “Not too boring for my wonderful daughter.”

Macy smirked.  “So If I’m your  _ wonderful _ daughter, what’s Archie?”

“His  _ teenaged _ daughter,” Robin suggested.

The Duke’s smile faltered.  “Is everything alright? You two seem… unkinder than usual.”

Macy stopped to reflect on what she had just said, then cringed.  “Yeah,” she confessed, “I guess I am a little upset because of something I just found out.”

“I have no excuse,” said Robin.  “I’m always like this. I just usually don’t have someone to riff off of.”  Zhe turned to Macy. “You should get upset more often. In fact, you probably will, since you’re turning thirteen yourself in, like, eight months.”

The duke stacked some papers together and stood up; the smile was back, accompanied by an energetic tone of voice which Macy couldn’t tell was fake.  “In the meantime, was there something you wanted to do?”

Macy stroked her chin for a moment.  “Right, right, I almost forgot the reason I was so snappy.”  A shadow fell over her face. “It’s about Pen.”

“You mean my eldest son, your older brother, whom I love very much and who is extremely devoted to both his family and his duchy?”  Had it not been for the almost childlike lilt in his delivery, Macy would have sworn her dad already knew what she was going to say and was attempting to pre-emptively disarm her.

“Yeah, about that.”  There was one last moment of hesitation.  Once more, Macy wondered if this whole thing was a ridiculous misunderstanding.  If there was one thing she knew for sure from watching sitcoms at the orphanage, it was that ridiculous misunderstandings like this happen constantly and there’s no possible way to avoid them no matter what you do.

_ Wait, yes there is: communication. _   “We-think-he’s-conspiring-to-try-and-get-rid-of-Captain-Faucher!”  This sentence came out as a single word, as if she didn’t want to give herself time to reconsider until the whole thing was said.

They then related to the Duke the events of that day — Robin listening in on Pen’s conspiratorial meeting, their conversation on the walk, their meeting with the guard captain, their trip to the holding cells, their conversation with the Duke, the time the conversation got meta—

“That’s enough,” said the Duke, holding up his hand toward Robin as zhe got to the seventh level of self-reference.  He sounded exhausted; his eyelids were drooping, and his posture was like a ragdoll.

“Aw.”  Robin lowered zhir head.  “But I was just getting a rhythm going.”

“If this is true, then… then…”

“It is,” intoned Macy.  She examined her feet, swinging one tentatively.  She could smell the dirt from outside. She would need to take a shower to feel clean again.  Everything was too dirty.

The Duke straightened, making a visible effort to focus his eyes on Macy.  “Then this demands serious investigation. My own son, making deals with murderers just to get revenge for imagined slights!”  A beat. “I feel like that should be more surprising than it is.”

“Awesome,” said Robin without a hint of irony.  “Looks like I’m right yet again!”

Macy glared piercing arrows at her friend.  “Could you  _ not _ right now?”

“Hehe, sorry.”  Robin slinked backwards out of the room, down the hall, and out of sight.

Macy turned to look at her dad.  Only now did she allow her eyes to water.  “Why?” she squeaked.

He walked over and hugged her tightly for thirty seconds before responding.  “Your older brother has a strong sense of justice,” he said, grasping her shoulders and staring into her eyes as she wiped away tears with her finger.  “He has always taken slights against the duchy and against me far more seriously than I ever did. I suppose I never did enough to discourage that facet of his personality; I though I needed someone that at my ear-slit.”

Macy sniffled.  “What’s going to happen now?”

The Duke rose, dusting himself off; he affected his typical jovial attitude so easily that Macy took a step backwards out of shock.  “I suppose I’ll have to talk to him about this,” he announced as if he were going to ask Pen whether he liked mustard on his PB&J. “Why don’t you go hang out in the garden?”

She stomped her foot, but she was too distressed to pout properly, so she came across as more dejected than petulant.  “I want to come with you!”

He turned to look at her, and she noticed that there were tears in his eyes, too.  “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“That’s fair.”  And she stood still, watching him leave to confront his son.

* * *

There are certain places in the world where time flows differently. This is true in a technical sense: The gravity well of a supermassive object, such as a black hole, dilates spacetime itself so that a second lasts an eternity. There are also places where the curvature of the universe is normal but time behaves strange regardless; these places are those where, whether due to the scenery, the ambiance, or simply the emotional weight tied to that locale, one can remain for hours and feel like only seconds have passed. They are insignificant next to the cosmic pull of a black hole, but they are no less impressive and no less important.

The spire atop Castle Jugland was one such location.  There, wispy clouds of crystalline ice drifted through, coating the shingles with a powdery frost year-round, carrying with them a bouquet of smells, of lily and lichen, of petrichor and pine, which had long since lost any identity of its own and now only gave the impression that it ought to smell like  _ something _ .  From here, one could look about the whole of Jugland — the Sienna Ridge, the Valley of Moths, the pass deeper into the mountains, the distant road to the Candy Kingdom — and beyond, even on a good day to where the Mystery Mountains began their gradual descent to the sea in the northwest.

This was where Marquess Penhaligon Jugland had his telescope trained when he heard footsteps ascending the long spiral staircase which led to this exposed chamber.  Other than his wife and daughter, few people besides himself ever came up here; there were plenty of other views, almost as good, which didn’t require quite so tedious a climb.  This spot, however, was the only vantage point in the duchy this side of the Valley of Moths from which one could, with the proper equipment, observe the migrating waterfowl which roosted between the mountains and the coast.

“Summer is coming,” he said in his best ominous voice as the figure behind him crested the stairwell.  He kept peering through his telescope. His gaze was transfixed on a particularly large flock of seagulls zigging and zagging as if lost.  Most likely a powerful thunderstorm had charged some of the natural lodestone deposits, messing with the magnetic fields the birds sometimes used to navigate.  His wife — Colla, the most beautiful birdologist in the world — had told him that such events, while possible, had never been recorded. And here he was without his sketchpad.  He could be the only person to ever bear witness to this unique accident. “Migration season is coming to a close.”

“Son,” the Duke said, reaching out, then faltered.  Pen could hear his father’s words catch in his throat.

“I know what this is about,” he said, turning around to face him, still gripping the telescope steady.  “I think it’s time we all get this off our chest.”

“Yes.”  The Duke didn’t have the energy to say more.

Pen took a long sniff of the thin mountain air before speaking.  “We need to sell the lakehouse.”

His father, who had his finger raised as if stretching it in preparation for an accusatory point, froze.  “Wha— huh?”

“Look, we hardly use it, and because of recent events the duchy isn’t in a cozy enough financial situation that us having a secondary property is a good look.  Colla and I can move back in, and Penny won’t be bored this time since Macy’s a lot closer to her age than Archie was. It makes financial sense, and with me home  _ all _ the time, I can share more of the political burden and let you  _ actually figure out _ what your daughter wants instead of sending her off on ridiculous quests all the time.”

“Wait, didn’t  _ you _ ask her to go get Cash’s help for the pudding theft?”

“Yes, I did, and that was a terrible idea which you should have stopped!”

The Duke looked down at his feet.  “You’re right, of course; I realize that now.  I need to—” Then he looked up angrily. “Wait a minute, that’s not why I came up here at all!”

“It isn’t?”  Pen glanced through the telescope again.  One of the gulls had taken out a compass and realized that the magnetic fields were wonky; they were now huddled around a map another one of them had brought, trying to use the nearby mountains to work out where they were and what direction to head next.  He removed the telescope from its stand, collapsed them, tucked them under his arm, and spun around to face his dad again. “What was it then?”

“It’s about Mél Faucher.”  The Duke spoke through gritted teeth now.  With every misty exhalation, a bit of his calm seemed to leave him.  He advanced toward his son, placing a firm hand on the side of his toupéed head, and repeated, “We need to talk about  _ Amélie Faucher _ .”

Pen laughed, looking off to one side at the duchy below.  “You mean Captain Mél? What, have you finally decided to let them go?”

And with a yell, father tackled son over the rail of the spire as the two tumbled down to the sloping roof below.

For a moment, falling through the air, Pen felt lost and weightless.  He imagined himself a gull.

The impact below was bracing, and it likely would have been much worse had Pen not thought to desperately grip the spire to the best of his ability, slowing the two down as they fell.  Still, it was enough to stun the pair as they began to roll down towards a parapet below.

It wasn’t until the steep icy grade of the shingles began to taper off toward the edge of the roof that either of the two nuts began to regain some control over their bodies.  The Duke tried to catch a foot on the smooth shingles, hoping to snag an errant tile and perhaps slow their slide, to no avail. He clawed and scrambled with one hand, miraculously still gripping his son tight with the other, managing to accrue a bit of ice under his fingernails but not tapering their descent by much.  At this point all of his extremities were numb from a combination of bruising, cold, and exertion.

Pen picked up his father’s slack, moving his legs as if swimming; the act scraped his knees, but it also had the desired effect of further reducing their fall rate.  In conjunction with the leveling off of the roof itself, he managed to reach a reasonable pace by the time they approached the parapet. Thinking quickly, he shouted, “Now!” and grabbed one side of the protrusion; his father, still gripping him, grabbed the other, and with a jolt that yanked the Duke’s arm out of its socket, they came to a sudden stop.

Between shallow breaths and dry heaves, Pen managed to ask his father, “What was that for?” except in a manner which involved words not fit for polite company.

The Duke massaged his arm and then looked at his son, regret joining the rage and remorse in his eyes.  “Why did you do it? Were your suspicions worth going behind the backs of — of the justice you hold dear?”

“Behind the backs?”  Pen sounded equal parts confused and insulted.  “What are you talking about?”

The Duke’s mouth hung hopen long enough for a mayfly to inspect it as a possible place to lay eggs.  “The deal!” he exploded, nearly letting go of the parapet and tumbling to the courtyard below. “The amnesty deal you made with Bandit Princess to falsely testify against Captain Faucher!”

“That’s not it at all!  I was just — wait a minute.”  Pen narrowed his eyes. “Where did you get that information?”

“From Robin.  Zhe overheard everything!  I couldn’t believe it at first, but zhe didn’t sound like zhe was lying.”

“Uh-huh.”  Pen bit his lower lip.  “And in how much  _ detail _ did zhe relay this information?”

“Now that you mention it, not much, but it was enough to know that you—”

He held up one hand like a crossing-guard indicating that his father’s sentence should wait for the next signal change.  “I think my dear sister’s friend relayed to you a  _ very _ distorted view of what actually happened.  Not that zhe lied, just that zhe didn’t quite get what was going on.”  He began to crawl over the edge of the parapet, searching for a foothold on the wall below.  “Listen, I’m gonna go get a ladder, and then we can discuss whose backs I may or may not be going behind.”

The Duke waited for five minutes, alone with his thoughts.  The first such thought was for his eldest son’s telescope; he looked around frantically, then saw that it had skidded away in a different direction but was miraculously undamaged in a rain-gutter.  That could be retrieved later. Next, he felt ashamed at his actions and haste. He should not have been so quick to anger. Except he hadn’t really been quick; he’d been holding in a lot of frustration for a while, and especially since last week.   _ I really need a better release mechanism _ .  Towards the end, his thoughts drifted darker, wondering if his son had abandoned him.

Then he saw a ladder-top appear before him, after which his son ascended, his wig blowing dramatically in the breeze.  “We need to talk about Mél. You see, I—”

* * *

“—can’t  _ believe _ that you’re doing this now of all times!” shouted Mél, her voice muffled by the door with the plaque reading “Lieutenant’s Office”.  In the light, this place seemed totally different from the dismal, shady hallway Robin had visited early that morning. For some reason the less foreboding version filled zhir with much more unease.

“And  _ I _ can’t believe you just tried to pull rank on me, under the circumstances.”  Zhe definitely recognized that voice as the one from before. So this was the famed Lieutenant Stachio.  Now that the mood wasn’t so conspiratorial, he sounded like a whiny brat.

“If you’re going through with this then — then you can expect a serious demotion when you inevitably come out with nothing!”

“And  _ you _ can expect a comfortable spot in the holding cells you were just visiting when I  _ do _ find what I’m looking for, as you await your trial.”

Evidently too flustered to respond, Mél stormed out of the room, once again flinging the door wide yet this time failing to dodge out of the way.  She hopped on one foot, holding her other angle, as she turned to face Robin. Zhe started to recoil before realizing the glower on the guard captain’s face was general rather than specific.

“Well, that sounded like it went poorly.”

Now  _ that _ was a specific glower.  “I don’t need your sass right now, civilian.”  Then she paused, took a breath and a half-step back, and started over.  “I would…  _ appreciate _ if you didn’t sass me, please.  And I thank you for bringing this to my attention.”

“Yeah, I  _ am _ pretty awesome,” Robin agreed as the two began to walk back toward Mél’s office.  “But are you gonna be okay?”

She sighed a tired sigh.  “Maybe. I meant what I said about not having sold information to Blondie, of course — I would never betray my people — but… well, the young Marquess may not be able to appreciate the gravity of an affair, but  _ you _ probably can.  You’re more mature than you let on, and I know rainicorn-dogs age fast.”

Robin began shifting colors and whistling nonchalantly as variegated shapes and spirals materialized around zhir head.

Mél laughed far harder than was warranted.  “I’m sorry,” she wheezed. Then she punched the wall next to her with an outraged yell.  Robin reached up and put a paw on her shoulder; Mél turned to stare into zhir iridescent ruby peepers.

Robin stared back and said, “That sounded like it went  _ really _ poorly.”

The guard captain tossed the rainicorn-dog to the side and paced down the hallway.  “It  _ really _ did,” she said without turning back.  “And I would  _ really _ like to think about how I’m going to handle this latest insubordination without constantly receiving  _ really _ unhelpful snark.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll back off,” said Robin as zhe began following Mél.  “Although I gotta say, ‘insubordination’ is a really mild way of putting it.”

“How so?  Insubordination is hardly a minor thing.”

“I just figured you’d be more upset about the treason.”

“What treason?”

“You know, obstructing justice to retrieve a false confession.”

Mél scratched her head for a minute before she realized what Robin was talking about.  “Oh, you mean the—”

* * *

“—affidavit,” explained Pen.  “Obviously it wouldn’t mean anything in court, but I only needed it to get a search warrant for Mél’s office.  Which I did, by the way, and was going to use as soon as I’d filled you in on the situation.”

“I see.”  The Duke wiped his brow, then returned to holding the ladder steady.  “Well, I still don’t like how you handled it, but that’s certainly not treason.  Although using an affidavit you believe to be made in bad faith is not how I raised you.”

“Don’t get the wrong impression; I totally believe Bandit Princess did hear Blondie say something to that effect.”  He retrieved his telescope from the gutter and began descending the ladder two rungs at a time. “Pete was the one who didn’t believe it.”

“Ah, yes, the lieutenant,” recalled the Duke as he folded the ladder and slung it under his arm.  “I gave him an award for ‘Service with Valor’ or something to that effect. I hope I don’t have to revoke that.”

Pen massaged his aching shoulder with his free hand.  “Hey listen, Dad, I’m sorry for going behind everyone’s backs with this.  I was so focused on making sure Mél didn’t find out that I didn’t think about how… well, how treason-y this would look to anyone else.  That deal with Bandit Princess — even if I’m right about her not lying, it wasn’t worth it.”

“What’s done is done.”  The Duke moved close to his son, giving him an armless hug since both of his hands were busy holding the ladder.  “I’m sorry, too; I overreacted and let my emotions get the better of me, all because I let myself be swayed by Robin’s colorful version of events.”

Pen chuckled.  “Why does zhe keep finding zhirself at the center of things?  It’s uncanny.”

“Bad luck, I suppose.  I just hope all of this drama doesn’t scar Macy too badly.”

“She seems fine.”

“I seemed fine, too, until I exploded at you.  I’m really sorry about that.”

“I deserved it.”

The Duke smirked.  “Yeah, you really did.”

Pen moved to jovially elbow his father, then reconsidered when his bruises from the roof flared up briefly.  “Since when did you know how to snark?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  I must have picked it up from you.  Or maybe—”

* * *

“—Robin!” called Macy as she raced toward her friend and the guard captain.

“Hello, young marquess,” said Mél as Robin ran forward to hug Macy.  “How went your conversation with your father?” She sounded amused, a twinkle in her eye, for reasons Macy could not fathom.

“Well, I suppose.”

“You suppose what?”

Macy narrowed her eyes in confusion.  “Well.”

“Oh, ‘well’  _ is _ what you suppose.”

Robin turned to face Mél.  “Is what she supposes what?”

“It went good,” Macy said in a loud monotone.  “What about you?”

Robin shrank about two feet.  “I learned a very valuable lesson about jumping to conclusions.”

“Basically zhe found out that you were blowing this entire thing way out of proportion,” Mél clarified.  “Zhe confused intrigue and bargaining for conspiracy against the duchy and neglected to mention that our co-conspirator was in fact the lieutenant of the Nut Guard and thus one of the few nuts who actually has the authority to make deals with high-priority prisoners.”

Robin shrugged.  “Oops.”

Macy raised a brow, arms crossed.  “After giving me a lecture about not remembering who Amélie Faucher was just this morning?”

“In my defense, I never claimed  _ not _ to be a hypocrite.”

Macy elbowed her friend playfully, which received an exaggerated groan of pain and dramatic fainting spell, all accompanied by a subconsciously-generated light show.  At the end, Macy dropped to her knees and wailed mournfully to a small round of applause from Amélie Faucher and a passing messenger.

As Macy was bowing, Robin got up and shook off a cloud of dust, sending zhir friend into a coughing fit.  “So, what happens—”

* * *

“—now?” asked Lisby with a sigh.

“Och, I’m sorry, Lisb me lad, bu’ these textbooks seem ta have minds a’ their own!” Galé was holding a hefty bound anthology of nineteenth-century kitchenware advertisements labeled  _ Bedtime Stories for Adults: A Collection for the Convenience Comparative Literature Students _ whose spine looked like it was warming up for the annual Ooo-wide Limbo Championships.

“I think you’re missing the point, Master Chesterfield,” explained the butler as he began setting the injured spine with supplies from the first-aid kit on the table beside him.

“An’ wha’ point would tha’ be, _cara maith?”_   Galé chewed on his fingernails nervously.  He forced himself not to look away. His books needed him to be here as much as he needed them, and in much the same way.

“‘Twould be the point that you’re attempting to solve a problem without actually understanding  _ why _ it’s a problem in the first place.”  Lisby held up the book for the marquess to see.  “You’ve attempted repeatedly to reinforce the spines of your textbooks by inserting these metal bars, no?”

Galé nodded, wiping a tear from his eye as the smell of book-glue filled his nostrils.  “It seemed ta help.”

“In the short term, perhaps.  But attempting to interfere where you lack knowledge means you have driven a wedge between the spine and the pages, thus leading to further weakening down the line.”  Lisby took some surgical glue from the first-aid kit and began sealing the cavity inside the collection’s spine. “You must learn patience, Master Chesterfield. The true value of aid, whether first or otherwise, is only realized when one first takes the time to focus on the situation which they are attempting to remedy.”

Galé sighed, eyes lowered in shame.  “Och, I s’pose yer right.”

“Come along,” said Lisby, taking Galé by the arm as he set the book down to dry.  “I’m sure you’re missed by your father. Hopefully nothing too crazy has gone down in the meantime, and if it has, I’m sure someone can—”

* * *

“—fill you in,” muttered Mél as she stood outside her office door in front of a very tired-looking Duke — almost as tired as she, but not quite.  That was a trophy she would not give up so easily. “But I assume you already know as much as I do, if not more.”

“I’m not quite sure about that,” confessed the Duke.  “This whole thing is rather complicated.”

“The important thing is I was mostly right,” said Robin.

“But wrong it some very important details,” countered Macy, her eyes closed and index finger extended as if giving a lecture and expecting everyone before her to take careful notes because this will be on the test.  “Like whether anything that was happening was actually wrong.”

Robin crossed zhir arms and snorted, looking away.  “When you put it like  _ that _ it sounds a lot worse.”

Pen came out of the office, holding a stack of unsealed envelopes.  “These are all the correspondences I could find between the suspect and — oh, hi Mél, I didn’t see you approach.”  A beat. “I have a warrant!”

Mél sighed.  “I know. Just… get through that quickly, okay?  Those letters have sentimental value to me.”

“Of course.  I just need to make sure things are on the up-and-up, at least to the degree that things can be on the up-and-up when it comes to—”  He looked at Macy, his eyes widening. “Uh, when it comes to, ah, matters of state.”

He walked away, Mél walked into her office, and the other three began walking toward the garden for their denouement.  “This kind of thing isn’t a weekly occurrence,” promised the Duke.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” said Robin, running circles around the Duke and Macy to burn off nervous energy as zhir stripes alternated through various stages of color.

As the distant wind chimes grew louder and Robin’s coloration slowly settled on zhir normal pattern, Macy began thinking about something that had been bothering her.

“Hey Dad,” she said finally, “what exactly is my brother—”

* * *

“—looking for?” asked Cinnamon Bun, his silver armor highlighting the determined blue of the fireproofing enchantment that let him live in the Red Palace amid the lava flows of the south of Ooo.

Flame King Phoebe threw more phernalia across the bedchamber.  At this point she had rifled through nearly every drawer, hamper, and closet in the palace, and the place was a bit of a mess.  Her hair, normally kept in a manageable wave, was now a gigantic, antler-like inferno. She turned to shout at her knightly husband, her face looking like a Cilantro painting.  “My flipping golf bag!”

Cinnamon Bun rested his flame-tipped spear on the flame-tipped-spear-rack that many rooms in the castle had for the convenience of those who didn’t want to leave their flame-tipped spears behind but also didn’t want to hold them all the time.  “Well, where did you use it last?”

Phoebe gripped the side of her head for a moment before bursting into an even larger inferno as she shouted, “ _ GOLF! _ ”

Cinnamon Bun blinked as the smell of scented candles in hickory and nutmeg, accidentally lit by this latest outburst, filled the room.  “Why don’t you take a break and then look for it when you’re calmer?”

Phoebe burned bright as the sun, briefly, before letting off some smoke and returning to her normal size.  She was a well-built woman, if a little on the short side, and despite the crown on her head, with her black jeans and oversized novelty t-shirt she might have passed for an ordinary human had her body not been made entirely of fire.  “…you’re probably right,” she said, slumping down onto the large water bed with a hiss of steam. “But the Life-Sized Miniature Golf invitational is tomorrow, and I want to head out tonight if we’re going to make the most of my one weekend off.  And it’s hard to be calm when I’m so worried about leaving the kingdom in the stead of my brother even for that short while.”

“If you’re worried about Flint usurping your authority, I don’t think that’ll happen,” Cinnamon Bun reassured her, taking a seat next to her and putting an arm around her.  She leaned on his shoulder; it felt warm, but thanks to the flame shield it didn’t burn. “And he won’t try to declare war on the Candy Kingdom, either. I’ve got a good read on that guy.”  He turned to face the Flame King. “Trust me, I’m a people person.”

She giggled, and in that moment she seemed twenty years younger.  “Yeah, I guess you’re — oh!” She glanced at something sticking out from under a corner of the bed, then dashed over in a burst of flame before pulling out a black-and-grey checkered duffel bag.  “I found it!”

“See?” he said as he got off the bed, sending ripples that knocked off a pillow on the far side.  “Once you calmed down it became a lot easier!”

“It really did,” she agreed, slinging the bag over her shoulders.  “I can’t believe it was right under—”

* * *

“—our noses,” insisted Macy as she sat between Robin and the Duke on the garden bench facing the birdbath.  “I mean, it would make sense, right? If she’s working for Princess Bubblegum, or at the very least working  _ with _ her, it wouldn’t necessarily be a conflict of interest, so there wouldn’t be anything stopping her from becoming Captain of the Guard — in her mind at least.  She wouldn’t need to worry about subverting your authority because she would answer to one higher than yours.”

“I thought that was the whole point of the warrant,” said Robin, conjuring brown sparkles on the ground that no self-respecting corvid would confuse for birdseed.  “Pen has all the correspondences between Captain Faucher and the late ambassador. If there really is such a leak, he’s going to find it.”

“Not if the captain  _ let _ him find those documents.  Think about it — he already knows about the ‘affair’, whatever that means, so if she pretends not to have had any communications, that’s suspicious.  But if she hid only  _ some _ of the communications, he could sift through the rest without knowing that there’s a huge chunk he’s missing.”

“Wait, so are you saying, after all this, that Pen was right?”

Macy smirked.  “No, I learned your lesson.  All I’m saying is that it’s possible.”

The Duke tossed some birdseed in the wrong direction, prompting a series of annoyed tweets from an ornery mountain jay.  “Well, I can’t say that’s impossible, but I don’t feel right about fomenting such misgivings after the events of this morning.  I don’t want to get caught in such a negative loop.”

“We don’t need to get caught in it ourselves,” suggested Macy.  “I could get that detective involved. Cash Daniels, P.I.” Then, quieter, “She’s so cool.”

“No.”

Macy and Robin both turned to look at the Duke in confusion.  “What was that?”

The Duke’s hand, clenched full of birdseed, was shaking.  “No, I don’t think that’s a wise decision, my daughter.”

Macy stood up, nearly falling off the bench; Robin caught her and stabilized her.  “But — but why not?”

He turned to look at her, tears once more welling up in his eyes.  “Macadamia, you’ve been through  _ too much _ since coming to the Duchy of Nuts.  You can’t fall into the adult world so soon.  Not like this, at least. If you recruit that detective, you’ll be pulled into the world of politics and intrigue and probably will never be able to escape.”

“I know, right?”  She sounded so excited.  Part of the Duke wanted to preserve that excitement.  The other part, the bigger part, knew what road that would lead down.

“Macy.”  He breathed in.  The spring air smelled like birds.  The Duke of Nuts loved all creatures, but he knew enough about birds not to trust them.  They would routinely push their children from the nest to teach them to fly, and they wouldn’t try to care for any bird who they thought couldn’t survive on their own.  In that regard, the Duke strove to be the opposite of a bird. “I love you, but I can’t allow you embroil yourself in adventure when it’s so clearly detrimental to—”

Macy’s expression drastically and imperceptibly changed.  No individual facial feature altered much, but the totality of her face was sadder, more hollow.  She stepped down from the bench, aided by Robin.

“Macy?” asked the Duke, but she didn’t even acknowledge him as she sulked away.

He returned to the birds, making sure despite his unfocus to actually give the birdseed  _ to _ them this time.  He was determined to get something right today.  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he chided himself. “That was about the most tactless way you could have gone about that!  How did you expect her to respond?” He sighed as one of the jays picked up some birdseed and put it in a leftovers bag.  “I just hope she isn’t going to be as rash as I just was.”

* * *

Macy threw one final item, the toothbrush she had received from Princeso, into her backpack before zipping it up.  She threw the backpack’s straps over her shoulders, now covered with a blue-grey hoodie. She had never really liked the hoodie, a Yulemas present from her old orphanage friend Masse Yvoire; the color worked on him, but on her it looked dingy and off-putting.  Still, it was about as different from the browns and greens of the Nut Kingdom as she could muster.

“You know,” Robin offered, “a responsible friend would tell you that you’re being extremely rash right now and will probably regret this pretty quickly.”

Macy grabbed her two items from the desk — the special coin and the letter from Masse — and stuffed them into her hoodie pocket, where she had already deposited her cameraphone.  “It’s a good thing you’re not responsible, right?”

“Hehehe.”  Robin rubbed the back of her head nervously and put on an unconvincing grin.  “That’s me. No responsibilities, no regrets.”

Macy looked around the room one last time.  Without the limiting effects of the coin-hole, the floral silhouettes on the green wallpaper seemed uncomfortably tame and regimented.  There was a stagnation in their trimmed appearance which made her shudder uncomfortably. She climbed onto the desk and looked out the window, towards the Valley of Moths.  Those were plants which could  _ actually _ grow wild and free.  She threw the window open, letting a cool breeze into the room, alight with the ripening smells of springtime.

She turned back to look at the room one last time.  Her copy of  _ A Collector’s Guide to Coinage, Vol. 47 _ sat on the bookshelf, surrounded by books lent by the Duke and the rest of her new family.  She had wanted to take it, but Robin had convinced her that it would be too heavy to realistically carry for long.  Now it seemed to weigh her down, calling her to remain here. There was a comfort in security, a comfort which was not the same thing as stagnation.  The book was always the same, but it was always fascinating.

While she was distracted, Robin had slipped behind her and climbed backwards out the window, whatever reservations zhe had held just moments before seemingly forgotten.  “C’mon, Macy,” zhe called, zhir face just peeking over the desk. “I know a shortcut to the Crystal Dimension near here. You can crash with my poppop while you think things over.”  Then zhe disappeared out of sight.

Wordlessly, Macy followed suit, closing the window behind her as she scaled down the wall of Castle Jugland.  And then in her room there was silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, Macy, I'm sure this is a good idea.
> 
> Anyway, as you can probably guess, the theme for this arc is “runaway”. The titular “flight of fancy” is Macy's ‘flight’ from the Duchy of Nuts, because she ‘fancies’ being an adventurer but her dad doesn't want her to be ‘traumatized’. This is a conflict that's been brewing since Episode 2 —  _most_ conflicts in this story have been brewing since Episode 2 — and there's more I intend to do with that dynamic, but for now it's the catalyst for this arc. As for where Macy and Robin will go next, you'll just have to wait another three weeks to find out. Or listen to Robin since zhe said they're going to the Crystal Dimension to crash with zhir grandfather. Either/or.
> 
> Speaking of Robin, zhe's becoming more of a jerk with every chapter I write. It's no secret that I draw in part from early Jake with zhir characterization, and early Jake was often deliberately unlikeable. I didn't want to make Macy and Robin's dynamic a carbon copy of Finn and Jake's (which is actually a change from my original concept for this project, where they _were_ Finn & Jake clones), so I toned that down in the beginning while playing up zhir social awkwardness and confusion, but I found that zhe lacked the ‘edge’ I needed to make the story work. That edge ended up being critical to making this plot work, in addition to said confusion, but there were times in drafting where I ended up taking zhir too far in the other direction. Having written a few chapters ahead already, I can safely say that zhir jerkiness is not, as one might fear, growing exponentially, so that's one worry crossed off.
> 
> Making her return from Chapter 2, we have Amélie Faucher. As I mentioned in that chapter's commentary, Captain Mél was originally not a part of my plans for the story. That was stupid of me, because without her I doubt this story could have worked. My original version of the story had Pen as an out-and-out villain, building off his characterization in “The Duke” (when he would have been, what, 36 years younger?). I decided to go with a more ambiguous approach, giving him an understandable (if only arguably justifiable) reason to release Bandit Princess and kick off the plot of the episode. The moral complexity of that motive is so central to the plot of this chapter, and Captain Mél so important to establishing that moral complexity, that I doubt any of this could have worked nearly as well without her.
> 
> I have nothing to say about Pete Stachio, and I can't think of any other characters I introduced this chapter. Certainly not any fan favorites whom I'd been specifically requested to include. Absolutely none of that, no sirree. Not a one. And if there were, then her presence in the upcoming arc would have been reduced for pacing purposes, making her hypothetical introduction her largest chunk of the narrative for a while. I would be sorry about that, but I _would_ feel it's the right decision. You know, hypothetically speaking and all that.
> 
> Anyway, I'm really looking forward to writing the rest of this arc — it'll feature some new locations, obviously, as well as some new faces both familiar and original. There's one character in particular from the cartoon who's going to play a _very_ important role, both in this arc and going forward, but that's for me to know and for you to find out. Unless you're one of my alpha readers, in which case it's for you to already know because I told you a couple days before this chapter went up.
> 
> I'd love to know what you guys think of this, as well as where you think Macy and Robin will go on their flight of fancy. (Except my alpha readers, you guys don't get to guess where it's going because by the time this chapter is posted you'll have already read the next two.) Speaking of which, WARNING: The next chapter has some descriptions of violence, injury, and blood. It's not much — no individual injury has more than one or two sentences describing it — but it still might be triggering to some people (heck it's mildly triggering to _me_ and I wrote the dang thing). Just a heads-up.
> 
> And last but certainly not least, your preview of the next chapter:  
> T.V. pressed his hands against his head and scrunched his face. “Come on, come on, come on! If I were a sandwich, where would I be?”


	5. Sandwiches Have Power

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Robin takes Macy to the Crystal Dimension to crash with her grandparents, when zhe discovers that an artifact of zhir grandfather’s was stolen.
> 
> Part 2 of 8-parter “Flight of Fancy”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, MASSIVE WARNING for this chapter: There are a few descriptions of bodily harm in this chapter that are more visceral than anything else thus far, which may be triggering to some. If that sort of thing isn't your cup of tea, you might want to prepare yourself before diving into this chapter. On a related note, those of you who don't like fifteen-thousand-word chapters (and who for some reason read this fanfic) may also want to prepare themselves, since this is my longest chapter so far — and I say this having already written three chapters in advance.
> 
> Between the ending of the last chapter, the teaser, and the chapter title, I'm really not doing a very good job concealing what this chapter will about. Sandwich fans, get hyped for sandwich-related shenanigans! The lore of this particular sandwich wasn't very thorough in the show itself, so I'll be taking some liberty sandwiches. You'll just have to trust me.
> 
> By the time my next chapter goes live, I'll have moved into my new apartment building, so depending on how that goes I might be late with that update. It'll still go up on the right day, just not necessarily at 7:00 in the morning like usual. Speaking of mornings, I have an exam literally today at 8 AM, so wish me luck!
> 
> Before the chapter begins, I'd like to give you a comment prompt to invigorate the comment section. What's your favorite kind of sandwich? Think about that as you read the chapter, then once you're done let me know the answer.

There was a loud sound like a glass thunderclap as the world went dark with color.

Macy clutched the chalcedony endtable, trying to avoid being sucked into the iridescent vortex in the center of the room.  She couldn’t find a good grip on the polished surface, so she had to settle for squeezing with all her might and hoping her fingers didn’t slip.  The blood drained from her knuckles, leaving them numb. Fine china sucked in from the kitchen pelted her legs as they dangled in the air. A hurricane of dust stung her eyes; even when she closed them, she could still see the colors rushing past.  “Hurry up!” she shouted hoarsely.

“I’m trying!” Robin called from the other side of the room, zhir voice barely carrying across the din of the colorful vortex.  In the rushing wind, the plastic buttons woven into zhir tail rattled like a muted wind chime. Zhe lit up zhir horn and fired more bolts of rainbow magic into the center, solidifying the color of the swirling mass and slowing down the overall shifting of hues.  It wasn’t enough, however; as quickly as its chroma shifting slowed, it resumed. “It’s hard to sense what colors it needs when it keeps sucking up my magic! Poppop, how’s Mommom?”

“She’s not looking too hothot,” T.V. called over his shoulder.  He turned back to his wife, the color drained from her six-foot-long body, her horn cracked in two places and held together with duct tape.  He took out some more gauze from a first-aid kit nearby and began patching up a gash on her face leaking a black ichor that used to be blood.  It stained the gauze like ink, swirling across in strange fractals unlike any normal liquid. He turned away. If he looked at that for too long, he might…

There was a knocking at the door.  “Open up!” shouted a gruff voice from the other side.

“We’re a little busy in here!” T.V. called impatiently.  “Come back later!”

“Get out here, you coward,” the voice responded with a canine growl.  “Don’t make me bust down this door; it’d be a shame to damage  _ two _ antiques.”

“Big whoop!” replied Robin.  Zhe lost zhir grip on the nailed-down couch zhe had been hiding behind, and the middle of zhir long body was suddenly stretched closer to the vortex.  “Wh _ oagh!” _

Thinking quickly, Macy picked up the lamp now hovering above the endtable, ripped the cord out of its socket, and threw it at Robin.  It knocked zhir out of the air and back down to the couch, where zhe was able to grab ahold of one of the feet and shrink down to zhir compressed size again so as to better hide behind the couch.  “Be careful, Robin!” she cried out.

Then she realized she was no longer holding onto the endtable and was pulled toward the vortex.

A voice emanated from within.  “<SOON>,” the voice bellowed in Korean, as Macy was drawn inexorably toward it.  She blindly reached out with her feet to find something — anything — to anchor herself down with.  Something caught, but it wasn’t heavy enough and was simply pulled with her instead. An eye appeared in the center of the vortex and opened up.  “<I’M GONNA TURN THIS WHOLE WORLD INSIDE-OUT.>”

* * *

Five hours earlier…

Macy caught up with Robin, panting.  She brushed an errant tree branch aside, shivering as its leaves tickled her shell.  “Don’t get too far ahead of me,” she complained.

“Don’t dally by the rosebushes,” countered Robin.  “We have to get there before the snake moves.”

“What snake?  Get where?”

Robin parted a drape of vines before them, revealing a quiet blue pond in a small grassy glade with a rock beside it on which a snake was tanning itself.  The sounds and smells of the forest of the Valley of Moths still filled Macy’s ears, but the aura of the pond seemed to dim them. For the most part, there was only the sound of the wind through the trees, the smell of clear water, the warm feeling of sun on her carapace.

“I had to get here while the snake was tanning,” explained Robin.  “In the afternoon, as the trees’ shadows begin to approach the rock, sie always goes back into the pond.”

“Sie?”

“All snakes use sie/sir pronouns; didn’t you know that?”  Robin said this like it was obvious, so Macy simply nodded.  Robin could never tell when other people were messing with zhir, so, possibly as an act of petty vengeance, zhe never made it clear when zhe was messing with anyone else.

“And that would be a bad thing because…?”  Macy examined the snake. It stuck out its tongue, tasting the air, but evidently decided Macy wasn’t a big enough threat to move.  Its blue-and-yellow scales seemed like a distortion of the noon sky above, as if its skin were a canvas upon which it had drawn a picture of the sun in anticipation of basking in its warmth.

Rather than answering with words, Robin curled into a spiral cone on the opposite side of the bond, closed zhir eyes, and lit up zhir horn.  Streaks of colored light began materializing, cracks in the electromagnetic spectrum, surrounding the rainicorn-dog before flowing like rivulets into the still surface of the bond below.  As Macy approached the pond, she realized it wasn’t merely still, it was  _ perfectly _ still — she could see with equal clarity her awed face’s reflection and the smooth chalky pebbles which lined its bottom.

The colors began to spread across the surface, melting Macy’s reflection into an oily rainbow and obscuring the pebbles below.  Everything was colors and shapes, and those shapes began rearranging themselves into bizarre patterns with no semblance to anything in the real world.  It reminded Macy of that incomprehensible triptych in the castle cathedral. Then the shapes took a new form, a fractal mosaic of rainbows.

And then Robin jumped into the middle.

There was no splash.  The surface of the pond was no longer a surface; the illusion of depth created by the fractal angles and dithering trajectories had seamlessly transitioned into  _ actual _ depth, and where there was once a pool of water now lay a hole of iridescent crystal.

“Come iiiiiin…” Robin called, zhir voice becoming distant as it echoed against the smooth walls.  Macy took a deep breath, closed her eyes — a part of her mind still insisted there was water — and jumped in.

Thirty seconds of freefall passed before she gasped for breath, her eyes fluttering open involuntarily.  She was falling through a deep hole; scents of sulfur, metal, and ozone hit her nose, along with a bouquet of smells she couldn’t quite place.  Some were somewhat familiar nevertheless, wisps which drifted up from the Jugland mines sometimes when the breeze was right. Others were totally alien to her.  There wasn’t enough light for her to identify any potential source of the smell, even with her superior eyesight. As for sound, there was nothing at all, not even the expected sound of wind rushing past her ear-slits.  Its absence was the most terrifying thing of all. Ah yes,  _ there _ was a sound: her nut heart beating so hard it wanted to escape from her chest.

Well, she could smell, and she was breathing, so clearly there was air; it was probably just thin.  Yes, that made sense, she told herself. She looked around again, taking out her cameraphone and turning on its flashlight.  As she suspected, the walls of this hole were crystals in every shape, size, and color, moving by too quickly to identify any individual gem.  The sky above was barely more than a pinhole; as she squinted, she noticed a faint watery gloss to the sun behind it, as if she were underwater.  So the pond was back. She was sure the snake would be happy to have hir favorite waterbathing spot back for when sie was done sunbathing.

Then Macy looked down and saw the light fast approaching.  She began to panic briefly —  _ What’s on the other side?  Am I going to— _ but then she saw a long spiraling silhouette below her with glowing horn and flapping jowl.  Robin was right below her, diving toward the light with aplomb. If Robin had led her down here, it couldn’t be  _ too _ dangerous, probably, she hoped.  No, she knew. She trusted her friend.

Still, she closed her eyes once more and didn’t open them again until Robin caught her.

Zhe set her down at the edge of a silvery lake whose surface bowed out in the wrong direction.  Instantly, Macy recognized that bizarre behavior from her chemistry class and backed away, pushing Robin back with her.  “That’s mercury!” she hissed. “What are you trying to do, poison me?”

Robin shook zhir head.  “Look around, Macy. We’re here.”

She took in the rest of the scenery.  She realized that the edge of the lake, and indeed all of the ground she could see, was made of crystals of pink and green.  The two were in the middle of a great crystalline bowl, with mercury at the bottom and a crystal mountain ridge at the top. There was no sun; light seemed to emanate omnidirectionally from a vast pink sky.  In the distance, hills of yellow gems dotted a shiny blue plain; a road of multicolored quartz was paved from there, leading around the whole circumference of the bowl, and then spoking off in all directions, toward a jade forest, an onyx ravine, a padparadscha plateau.  Nestled in the hills was a towering city of glass and stone, streams of light shooting out in all directions at random intervals. “The Crystal Dimension,” she whispered, awestruck.

“Come on,” said Robin, taking Macy by the arm.  “You haven’t met my grandparents yet, right?”

Macy merely gave a thumbs-up as she continued to observe the tableau before her.  She had never seen anything so beautiful in her life. It was like a dream, except with less being haunted by the corpse of Blondie Palmerson, his pallid visage stalking her constantly, hiding behind every corner, in every shadow, on every unseen face, sneaking up behind her, his breath on her back as it prepared to—

Macy stumbled on the crest of the bowl and began tumbling down the quartz road.  As she rolled, she heard the sound of crystals snapping off in her wake. She reached the bottom several minutes later and stood up, only to see Robin not far behind her collecting the crystals.

“What?” zhe asked, putting a crystal in zhir mouth and breaking off the end with a crunch.  “They’re goof f’r magmc.”

Macy rolled her eyes and started walking down the road.  “I assume that city over there is where your grandparents live?”

“Mhm,” replied Robin, swallowing.  Zhe dropped the remaining crystals unceremoniously on the ground with a clatter.  “Fort Eisenkiesel. Named after the gem. It’s where my grandnanny grew up. Poppop moved there with Mommom after he quit the detective business to raise Dad and his siblings.”

“You have uncles?”  Macy raised her eyebrow.  “You never told me that.”

Robin shrugged.  “I like to stay mysterious.”  A beat. “Also I’m terrible at keeping in contact with people.”

“Your poppop doesn’t even know we’re coming, does he?”

“He will soon enough.”

As they approached the glistening city, Macy was able to make out more of the details.  The glass-and-stone construction of the buildings, she realized, was only for the newer edifices; the older ones were forged of crystal, like the rest of this dimension.  In particular, many of the oldest buildings — Macy assumed they were old, based on the rounded corners from frequent buffing of chip damage — were made of a deep red-orange gem she presumed to be eisenkiesel.  She could make out the distant figures of rainicorns, dogs, and the occasional rainicorn-dog milling about. Some pups were playing in a field while a matronly dachshund watched from the porch. A short rainicorn and long dog were performing street magic for a crowd of engaged onlookers.  From a stadium near the center of town she could see frequent beams of colorful magic, as well as rainicorns occasionally flying out and then back in; probably there was some sort of rainicorn-specific athletic event going on.

Robin led her through the winding streets, their intersections forming angles based not on any reasonable civil engineering but the shape of the crystal foundations upon which the city was built.  As zhe guided her into a residential district, the smells of domestic life hit Macy’s nose, feeling oddly pedestrian in such a wondrous place. Would her own world seem just as fascinating to someone from this plane of existence?  Did it to Robin? She’d have to ask about that when she got a chance.

They strolled up to a small, one-story house in a cul-de-sac ornamented with a single organic pear tree.  Robin shrank to zhir inside size and rang the doorbell, which sounded like a thousand silver spoons being tinked against a thousand half-full glasses of grape juice.

There was a crash, and then a clattering, and then loud stumbling, and then the doorknob rattled vigorously before it finally swung open.  Macy instantly knew that the rainicorn-dog standing before her was Robin’s poppop. They didn’t look alike at all — this man was tall for a dog but short for a rainicorn; his colors were light and somewhat desaturated, dominated by a pale blue-grey on top with pastel stripes below; he had no jowls to speak of, but the horn on his forehead was larger than Robin’s; and he was almost perfectly spherical, to a degree that put even Macy herself to shame.

“‘Sup?” said T.V.

“Hey, Poppop,” Robin said as zhe slithered past him, shrinking zhirself somewhat to fit between him and the doorframe.  He stepped out of the way as zhe turned back to him and asked, without a hint of irony, “Can I come in?”

“Sure,” he said in a chipper tone.  He gestured to Macy. “Is this your friend?  They can come in, too.”

She introduced herself as “Macadamia the Nut, she/her,” in a tone which she recognized as ‘prim and proper’ from her sitcoms but which a 21st-century viewer would recognize as ‘horribly offensive to all of England and parts of eastern Wales.’

“Well, hello then, Macadamia.”  He clasped her hand in both of his and shook it like a soda can.  “Can I just call you Damy?”

She blinked.  “Uh, I don’t see why not.”

“Sweet.  Why don’t you come inside and let me get you some tea?”

Macy stepped into a cozy but eclectic living room.  No two elements seemed to have been designed to share the same space.  One couch was old and ratty, with almost as much duct tape as felt showing; the other was sleek and modern.  There was a polished wooden rocking-chair with velvet cushions next to a fake electric fireplace, above which was hung a novelty painting of a winged dog (or perhaps a normal painting of a dog who happened to have wings).  A glass cabinet in the corner held a collection of action figures, Yulemas ornaments, and antique lamps, crowned by an ornate wooden box with a “DO  NOT OPEN please” note taped on.  In the corner of the room, another lamp sat on a light blue endtable, emitting a flickering light.

On his way through the open doorway that led to the crowded kitchenette, T.V. reached his paw under the lampshade and fiddled with the bulb; its light became constant.  “Sorry about that,” he said, laughing. “This thing keeps coming loose. We should really get rid of it.” Then he wandered into the kitchenette and began to search through drawers, presumably looking for tea.

Macy tried to sit on the newer-looking couch several times, sliding off each time; crystal chic was apparently not designed with nut bodies in mind.  Sighing, she crossed the room and sat down on the older-looking couch, sinking in several inches with a creaking sound and a musty smell. She coughed.  “What’s up with this place?” she asked.

Robin lay down on the newer couch, stretching back to zhir normal size so zhe could take up its entire length.  “I dunno, I think it’s kinda nice.” Zhe yawned, spreading zhir arms and popping zhir shoulders. “There’s something authentic about it.”

Before Macy could say “What the glob does that mean?” T.V. called out from the kitchen.  “Hey, I forgot to ask what kind of tea you guys wanted. We have green tea, red tea, heliotrope tea, ginseng…”

“I’d like an entire pot of black coffee,” said Robin.  “With a stick of cinnamon.”

“Can you get me a green tea?” asked Macy.  “With honey, please.”

“Okay.”  T.V. shuffled through several drawers.  “Oh, looks like we’re out of honey; is sugar okay?”

“Of cou—”

“Whoops, never mind, found honey.”

As T.V. brought the kettle to boil and started percolating the coffee beans, Macy fixed her gaze on Robin.  “Hey,” she said quietly. “About what you said earlier?”

“What’d I say?”  Zhe sat up intently.

Macy shifted her weight, trying to find a spot where a spring wouldn’t poke her in the undercarapace.  No such spot existed. “You were trying to tell me not to run away.”

“You ran away?” came T.V.’s voice from the kitchenette.

“No!” Macy shouted back.  Then she leaned toward Robin.  “I should have listened. This was a terrible idea and I want to head back.”

“Don’t leave yet!” whined Robin.  “You haven’t even gotten your tea!  Plus you have to meet my mommom.”

Macy sat back.  The couch creaked once more under her.  “I… what are you talking about?”

Robin fixed Macy with an accusatory glare.  “You’re trying to weasel your way out of meeting my family.  Friends meet friends’ families! Except when those families are dirtbags.  But my grandparents aren’t dirtbags!”

“Okay, okay.”  Macy put her hands up in surrender.  “I’ll stay. But after this I’m heading back home, unless something suitably dramatic comes up.”

Just then there was a knock at the door.  “I’ll get it,” said Robin as zhe walked — no, flowed — to the door, fumbling with the latch before cracking the door open.  Macy could see why T.V. had jiggled it before letting them in earlier; the exposed locking mechanism on the door looked to be a veritable hodgepodge of mutually-destructive kludges.  It was almost as if it had been repeatedly broken and repaired over an extended period of time.

Macy took another look around the room.  Its eclectic nature seemed more foreboding now.  The sleek couch and endtable across the room from her were the only two things that seemed to go together.  She wondered why that was.

After a few moments and some bickering that Macy couldn’t make out, Robin closed the door and went back over to the couch.

“Who was it?” called T.V., setting down a stepstool so he could grab mugs from a high cabinet.

“Just some salespeople,” replied Robin.  “I told ‘em to step off.”

T.V. poured two mugs of tea and one of coffee, then carried them into the living room and handed each of the guests their respective drink.  “There’s more where that came from,” he said, taking his own mug of tea off of his head and setting it on his knee as he sat down on the rocking-chair, “so feel free to ask for seconds.  Ow that’s hot.”

Macy breathed across her tea.  The scent settled her mind. She was overreacting, of course, and she knew it — she was doing what Robin had done earlier that day with Pen and that guard captain whose name escaped her mind.  She wore green, that much Macy knew.

After waiting a few moments for it to cool, Macy finally took a sip of the tea.  It was hot against her lips, like fire or stew. She relished the warmth as she took in the sweetened tea with a wet slurping sound.  More so than the taste, it was the smooth, uncomplicated warmth of tea which she enjoyed.

“Hey Damy,” asked T.V.  Macy looked up at him, nodding in acknowledgement as she slurped her tea.  “Robin’s talked about you a bit in zhir prismgrams. You’re, uh… zhir friend, right?”

Macy swallowed.  “If you’re dancing around asking whether I’m the orphan, then yes, I am.  Was, rather; I was actually adopted a few weeks ago by the Duke of Nuts.”

“ _ Mazel Tov. _ ”

“I don’t speak Korean.”  T.V. laughed when she said this; she didn’t know what was funny.

“Hey, Macy,” said Robin, dangling zhir already-empty coffee mug to show off the dregs on the bottom.  “Tell him about how you want to be an adventurer.”

“Oh!”  Macy put her arms down, resting her tea on the couch without letting go of the handle, and turned to T.V.  “I want to be an adventurer.”

“Neat.”  He took a sip of his tea.  “Ow that’s hot. You know, I used to be a private investigator; that’s kind of like being an adventurer.  I could tell you about it.”

“Oh yes, please do!”  Macy downed a swig of tea, scalding the back of her throat.

T.V.’s eyes glazed over.  “Back in the old days, the three of us all lived together.  Me, Viola, and Jake Jr., that is. Kim Kil Whan had his own place, and Charlie was off with her secret project in the ruins on the other side of the planet.”  Suddenly an image sprang to life in the middle of the room: an office building with eclectic decorations and homey furnishings, with three rainicorn-dogs sitting on a couch looking over some papers.  Macy recognized the couch as the very one she was sitting on.

“We were as close as siblings,” he continued, his pupils dilated and his voice naught above a whisper, “which makes sense since we’re siblings.  We all pitched in to help refurbish the place, and I rebooted our grandparents’ detective agency to keep the lights on.” The image of T.V. walked over to the office and put up a placard reading “DETECTIVE TV”, then sat back on the desk, arms crossed, in a manner that brought to Macy’s mind images of the other detective she knew, Cash Daniels.  Outside the hallucinatory window, rain began to pour.

“I was a good detective, or so I’d like to think.  I learned a lot from studying the case files left behind after Joshua & Margaret Investigations closed down.  Being a private investigator is a tricky business, and sometimes you have to doubt even what your client tells you when they hire you, which is a tough thing to learn to do.”  A small green elephant walked into T.V.’s office, clearly distressed; she set a covered wicker picnic basket down on his desk, reached her feet up on the table to look at him, and began telling him something as he scribbled on a notepad in front of him.  Jake Jr., a pastel-colored rainicorn-dog with long blonde hair and a sunken face, walked into the room behind Tree Trunk and began stacking boxes. Macy moved out of the way to make room for her; she could no longer hear the creaking of the physical couch she sat on, so drowned out was it by the rain and the sound of boxes moving.  Despite this, she could not hear — or rather, could not understand — a word of T.V. and his client’s conversation.

“Still, with the help of my sisters, I was able to solve a bunch of cases and make a lot of peoples’ lives better.”  The image of T.V. looked inside the box, then sniffed. Macy couldn’t tell what he was smelling — what she was smelling — but whatever that smell was, it was unmistakable.  He immediately tore out the first page of his sketchbook and tossed it into the garbage, where it started twitching violently and overtaking the can. Jake Jr. grabbed a gizmo out of the box she was holding and the two of them rushed out of the room, Tree Trunks tailing them.  Soon the three were out of sight.

“But if you investigate enough crime, soon you come face to face with the really nasty kind of criminal.  The kind who won’t take ‘just put the pie down and we can talk through this like reasonable adults’ for an answer.”  The papery mess, now larger than the trash can itself, folded itself up and reassembled itself into the silhouette of a chihuahua, which then unfolded into five more, holding hands.  They materialized into a line of chihuahua ninjas dressed in all black, each of whom grabbed one of the boxes Jake Jr. had been stacking and then leapt through the window. Robin tried to follow but smacked into the glass.

“Eventually we were forced into a confrontation with the Rhodonite Ruffians, a big scary canine mafia which controlled most of the gem trade between Ooo and the Crystal Dimension.  That battle got so intense, our mom had to come help us.” Sure enough, there was Lady Rainicorn, holding a spear the size of her seven-meter body and standing her ground between a group of angry dogs and T.V.’s group, including two more who hadn’t been on the couch earlier, who were scampering through an abandoned building searching for cover that was ever-dwindling thanks to enemy mortar fire.  Viola took a few potshots at the entrenched Rhodonite forces and got her beautiful battle-dress singed in return. T.V. walked right up behind an enemy soldier, poked them on the shoulder, and then clocked them in the jaw. Macy felt a sympathetic twinge in her nut chin. By the time they hit the ground he had picked up their weapon and begun firing like a maddog.

“When the smoke cleared, the battle was won, but not all of the hostages had made it out, and Charlie was injured pretty badly.  She’s still in a coma to this day, actually.” T.V. ran through a collapsing doorway, whose other side transformed into a hospital bed where a dog who looked remarkably like a long-haired Jake was hooked up to an IV.  Dr. Minerva — or rather, one of her robotic avatars — and Dr. Princess were standing over, comparing notes. It was clear from their expressions that none of those notes were good. T.V. broke down sobbing at the foot of the bed; rain came from his face and began flooding the floor.  As the salty-sweet tide rose, for the second time that day, Macy found herself panicking because she should have been drowning but wasn’t.

“I was pretty shaken up myself; I couldn’t bring myself to go into open spaces for weeks.  Obviously I needed a change of pace, so I moved in with my girlfriend, who soon became my wife, Allowance.”  A stocky rainicorn with a teal jersey that complemented their green-heavy rainbow pattern — Allowance, Macy supposed — came and led T.V. away hoof in paw.  The hospital hallway turned into the hall of a chapel, where a worm in black and white clothes was saying something Macy couldn’t make out but somehow recognized as wedding vows.

Then the vision faded, and they were back in the disordered living room of T.V.  Macy finished the last of her tea; it had gone tepid. His pupils still dilated, T.V. said in a hoarse voice, “And the rest is history.”

Robin peeled zhir face off of the wall.  “Poppop, I told you not to do that! Macy has hallucinations.”

“Well, I mean you never told me that, but I’m sorry Damy.”

“Oh, no, it’s perfectly fine,” Macy assured him.  “That wasn’t anything like what happens to me. It felt less — I don’t know how to describe it.  It was fine though.” She held out her mug. “More tea, please?”

“Sure.”  He collected the mug and headed back into the kitchenette.

Macy turned to Robin.  “You never tell me  _ anything _ about your family!”

“You never tell me anything about yours.”

Macy stood up, walked across the room, and slapped Robin.  She then attempted to sit down on the opposite end of the couch, the end next to the endtable, but slipped, spun in the air, and landed on her face.  But at least she was on the fancy couch now.

“Sorry,” Robin chuckled.  “But c’mon, you research this stuff for fun.  You should probably know more about my family than I do.”

“No, I shouldn’t,” said Macy, sliding into the arm of the couch to trick her body into going upright.  “I  _ do _ , but I definitely shouldn’t.   _ You _ should talk to them more.”  She sighed, thinking once more about how she had exploded at her father.  Considering what had happened to T.V. and Charlie, he may have been right to stop her from doing more adventure.   _ Adventure is bad _ , she decided.  “Appreciate the family you have.”

“And not the jerks who only pretended to raise me because it would be socially unacceptable to do less than the bare minimum in public,” Robin finished.  Macy stared at zhir, eyes wide. “What?” zhe shrugged. “Don’t tell me I never told you about my biological p—”

_ “You never told me about your biological parents,” _ Macy half-shouted.  “You’ve mentioned that your dad’s a deadbeat and your mom’s weird in some unspecified way, but you always refused to talk about them in any more detail.  I thought you were traumatized!”

Robin took a sip of zhir coffee dregs.  “Maybe I am.”

Macy sighed and crossed her arms.  “When’s your mommom going to get here?”

“How should I know?  I never see her. Could be hours for all I know.”

Just then there was a jingling before the door swung open and the rainicorn from the end of T.V.’s vision walked into the house.  “<Honey, I’m home!>” she announced, hanging up a soaking-wet hat on a rack near the door.

“How did the, ah, game go?” asked T.V. as he came out of the kitchenette and gave Macy her second mug of green tea.

“<We won in a total cave-in, as usual.  Spirits 72, Jeju 34. We had a rough second quarter after an illegal check gave me a horn chip—>” she gestured to her horn, which indeed had a small crack in the side — “<but we got our sweet revenge.>”

“That’s wonderful, sweetie!” exclaimed T.V.  “Oh, by the way, these are our guests. You know Robin, obviously, but this is zhir friend, Damy.”  He leaned toward her, cupped his hand to his lips, and whispered,  _ “She’s a marquess.” _

Allowance nodded.  “<What’s a marquess?>”

“<The child of a duke,>” Robin explained.  “<It’s an Ooo thing. You know, that whole ‘royal tradition’ hullabaloo.  I’ve never really understood it. Personally, I think we should just dismantle the whole system and send all the nobles to the mines.>”

Macy nodded blankly.  “Yeah, whatever zhe said.”

“<Did you give them the tour?>” Allowance asked, heading over to the old couch and lying down on it.  When she did it, the creak sounded satisfying rather than disconcerting.

“Not yet,” replied T.V.  “I did give them tea.”

“<Give them the tour.>”

“Okay,” said T.V.  He gestured around the room, his arm sweeping from the once-again-flickering lamp across the couch to the fireplace to the other couch to the display cabinet topped with the box.  “This is our—” He paused, his arm still outstretched toward the cabinet, now trembling. “That’s the wrong box,” he mumbled.

“<What!?>” said Allowance.  “What?” said Macy.

“That’s the wrong box,” he said again, more forcefully.  He ran into the kitchenette, came out with a stepstool, and climbed up to take the box down from atop the cabinet.  He opened it, then threw it on the ground in disgust; it was empty.

“What’s the right box, then?” asked Robin, moving over to inspect the box on the ground.  Zhe picked it up and peered in, closing one eye. “This thing’s got some really shoddy craftsmanship.  The inside isn’t smooth at all.” Zhe tossed it over zhir shoulder; it landed right where zhe had been sitting before and then slid over to Macy, who nervously shoved it under the chalcedony endtable with her foot, afraid it could knock her off.

“It’s been stolen.  Probably Lee’s old friends.”

“<That wannabe terrorist?>” asked Allowance, bolting upright.  “<Wasn’t he killed by the very same weapon that was supposed to be in that box over thirty years ago?>”

“That’s what we thought, but we don’t actually know what it does.  Maybe they do.” He went over to a closet behind the hat rack and grabbed a thick yellow poncho.  “Robin, Damy, will you two be alright here for a while?”

“Yeah,” said Robin.

“I have no idea what’s going on, but yeah,” agreed Macy.

“Also,” T.V. added, stuffing tools from a hanging wire basket into the poncho’s bulky pockets, “could you do me a favor and prismgram my mom?  Ask her to get over here as quickly as she can.”

“<If we’re looking for Lee’s buddies, I know who to ask,>” said Allowance as she grabbed a heavy green jacket that seemed to be armored.  “<One of my teammates’ siblings has connections in the underground. I’ve been holding off on saying anything about it because I figured something like this might happen eventually.>”

T.V. bent over and kissed her on the cheek.  “That’s why I love you, Lowie.” Then he dashed out the door, his wife right behind him.

Robin grabbed a crystal from the display cabinet — Macy realized it must be  a prismgram crystal — and sprawled out on the rickety old couch, mimicking zhir mommom.  “<Look at me, Macy,>” zhe said in a poor imitation of Allowance’s gruff, nasally accent. “<I’m a sports star, so I get the entire couch to myself!>”

Macy sipped her tea.  “What?”

* * *

“What!?”

Allowance put a hoof over her husband’s mouth to silence the exclamation.  They had reached the warehouse her contact had told them to find — a storage facility for a line of gadgets that were high end when T.V. was still a detective.  They were crouched on an upper balcony behind a box of cameraphones, observing a heated discussion on the main floor.

“I can’t believe it,” he whispered, his voice muffled by the hoof over his lips.  “ _ They’re _ working with  _ them? _ ”

She nodded solemnly.  “<Not very well, from the sounds of it.>”  As if to reinforce this, the dogs and rainicorns down below increased the volume of their dissenting shouts.  The two spies could make out the words “tonight,” “after all these years,” and “<can’t trust>”, but everything else was still too hectic to understand.

“Of course they’re not getting along smoothly; they’re an anarchist ring and a once-powerful crime syndicate.  I’m just surprised they can get along at all.” It was just T.V.’s luck that Lee’s former buddies had just so happened to strike a deal with what remained of the Rhodonite Ruffians.  He had so badly wanted to disbelieve Allowance’s friend.

Just then there was a horrid scrape of crystal on crystal as one of the apparent leaders of the groups below, a matronly dachshund, drew a jagged cassiterite sword from a well-concealed sheath and yelped something incomprehensible at the bored-looking rainicorn across the table from her.  Around the warehouse, people began moving about with more urgency and haste. “<We need to move now,>” urged Allowance; she and T.V. raced into the upper hallway and ducked into a cramped maintanence closet just as panicked footsteps rounded the corner behind them.

Once they were reasonably confident nobody was going to overhear them, Allowance cleared some space in the center of the room and illuminated the small space with her horn.  A trinkle of rainbow magic leaked from the chip in the keratinous appendage, but she didn’t seem to notice. “<We need to figure out where they might have stashed the Mergence of Destruction,>” she said.  “Skip to de skedaddle <and do your thing!>”

T.V. pressed his hands against his head and scrunched his face.  “Come on, come on, come on! If I were a sandwich, where would I be?”

When he opened his eyes, the supply closet was gone.  He was standing in the same half-demolished building from his vision earlier that day; the battle was still raging on.  He was holding a shoulder-mounted cannon made of shadow agate, whose inner shadow — an illusion formed by the gem’s indeterminate translucence — framed the explosive projectile within like a dark halo.  Allowance was guarding him in jasper plate armor, knocking aside Lady Rainicorn’s furious spear jabs with a mace and countering her magical blasts before they could reach him.

He scanned the hectic battlefield for threats.  Beyond about twenty feet out, it was all empty space and formless blobs of chaos still hastily assembling themselves into something resembling a possible version of reality.  The one exception was an outcropping far in the distance where he could just barely make out the figure of a rainicorn-dog writing symbols in dust and broken class on a cracked cement floor.

He fired.

Immediately, a building began materializing just on time to collapse, starting with the far side where the figure —  _ Charlie _ , he had to remind himself — now lay unconscious and burning.  Lady gasped and ran towards her; Allowance managed to get in a solid whack with her mace, breaking Lady’s leg with an uncomfortable squelch.  Unable to reload quickly enough, T.V. could do nothing but watch as Lady flew over to her daughter, picked up her limp body, and phased through the wall with her just before that whole section of the building became nothing more than a rapidly-approaching pile of rubble.

The wave of destruction crashed toward T.V. and Allowance, breaking up the ground beneath their feet and causing them to fall into infinite darkness.  As he was falling, he saw the giant form of the hospital bed growing larger beneath them, his sister lying still and staring directly at him, her brows furrowed and her mouth bent into a hostile frown.  He realized he was still holding onto his weapon and tried to throw it, but the boundary between his hands and the weapon was now gone; it grew heavier on the ends of his arms, pulling him ever faster toward the bed as it grew larger.

He tried to turn away, but he felt an arm on his shoulder guide his vision toward Charlie once more.  “<Don’t run,>” Allowance whispered in his ear. “<You have to acknowledge it or you’ll be caught in a loop.>”  He breathed in the familiar scent of hospital chemicals, willed his heart to slow down just enough to not feel like a woodpecker was trapped in his chest, and stared back into his sister’s glazed-over eyes.

Then he landed on the empty hospital bed.  It was he who was hooked up to the IV, one leg cast and suspended, one arm dangling numb over the side of the bed.  He shifted his shoulder, hoping the arm would wake up soon.

A towering dachshund walked through the hospital door, not looking very matronly at all.  “Pull yourself together—” she boomed before her voice temporarily dissolved into static. “The  _ jisa _ ’s stallions are on our fluffy little tails after that disaster of a fight.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” he croaked.  He realized that the hospital bed was in a cold, damp, acrid underground bunker.  Something green was growing in the corner that he didn’t think was supposed to. A pungent lantana flower bloomed on Allowance’s nose before falling off to reveal a handlebar mustache.

“You’re damn right you’re sorry.  You’re a crack shot, Pugliacci, but you should have aimed for that meddlesome detective instead of that inscrutable sister of his.”  ‘Sir’ jabbed a paw at Allowance, who was sitting on the floor tapping her foot to something in her headphones. “At least your boyfriend got a solid whack in on that tranch Lady Rainicorn.”

Allowance raised a hand in acknowledgement and said, “‘Sup,” in the voice she always used to imitate men — her normal voice but pitched up.

“Oh, I’ll tell you ‘sup.  ‘Sup is that you’re dancing on celestine.  If you don’t prove your worth, you can consider yourself out of the Ruffians for good.  And I’m sure you’re very familiar with our retirement plan.” She said the words “retirement plan” the way someone might say “fish bicycle” in an alternate universe where the phrase “fish bicycle” was a euphemism for death.  Then she exploded into shadowy wisps and vanished as the floor of the bunker opened down and T.V.’s hospital bed slid into a back alley down below.

The cast melted away like butter as T.V. and Allowance touched down in the alleyway, crystal dust jabbing painfully into the soles of their paws/hooves.  “Boss Gasket is right,” T.V. moaned, plucking a lapis shard from his toe. “This is all my fault.”

“<That’s not true,>” insisted Allowance, still in that high-pitched voice.  “<You did what you could and lost anyway. That’s life, pal. Nobody can win every game.>”

“Well, we’ve lost this one pretty bad,” he said, peering out the corner of the alleyway.  He saw his own head poking out about a block down. The distant smell of fresh grass made his stomach growl.  “I need a trump card. And a sandwich.”

“<Why not both?>” came a voice even more nasally than Allowance’s.  T.V. ducked back into the club he’d been standing in the whole time, and next to Allowance was a beagle in a bowler hat, sitting on a newspaper and reading a chair.

“<Pugliacci, this is Boomer,>” said Allowance.  “<He says he also wants to get back at that detective, and he has a plan to do so.>”

Boomer smiled, showing off rows of shark teeth which went much further back than the base of his skull would allow.  “<Have you ever heard of the Crystal Mergence of Destruction?>”

* * *

“So what is it?”

Robin stared at Macy like the question offended zhir as zhe handed her a third mug of tea.  “What is what?”

“What we were just talking about.  The thing that should have been in the box.  The thing you just told Lady Rainicorn was missing!  What is it?”

Robin shrugged as zhe flopped back onto the couch, doing a swan dive so that zhe bounced a couple times on impact; the springs creaked loudly in protest, not used to such energized lounging.  “Dunno. Some kinda thing I guess. Probably boring.”

Macy loudly swallowed her tea and then breathed out a burst of hot, fragrant breath.  “I don’t believe that you don’t at  _ least _ have a guess as to what it could be.”

Robin stared at the ceiling for a moment.  “You know what’s always weirded me out?”

“What?”

“Stucco.  I don’t really get why people find it attractive.  It’s just lumpy beige plaster you put on the ceiling.”

Macy attempted a leg-tilt but ended up sliding onto her side instead, having forgotten that she was on a slippery couch.  “The ceiling here isn’t even stucco.”

“Yeah, I guess not.  It’s kinda like stucco though.”  Robin then looked directly into Macy’s eyes, going so far as to tilt zhir head sideways to match the nut’s, and spoke with more gravitas than Macy had ever heard zhir use.  “The Crystal Mergence of Destruction.”

“Huh?”

“That’s what I think was in the box.  It’s a powerful artifact my grandnanny helped steal from Fort Eisenkiesel — and by that I mean the actual military base the town is named after.”

Macy sat up with some difficulty, bracing her arm against the endtable to stop herself from falling over again.

Robin continued.  “Presumably it’s some kind of powerful weapon.  We’re not sure exactly what it does, but Grandnanny never intended to find out.  She betrayed her dirtbag ex-boyfriend Lee, the scumbag who made the plans to steal it in the first place, and hid it away in a farmhouse in Ooo.  Lee eventually recovered it, kidnapping Poppop in the process, but when he tried to use it, he got sucked inside it or something. It would have taken Poppop and Grandnanny, too, but ol’ Poppop managed to seal it inside of that box — or,” zhe added, “apparently a different box that just looks like that one.”

Macy took a long drink from her tea, which had somehow escaped spilling throughout the whole ordeal.  She let Robin’s story sink in as it poured down her throat. “Wow,” she said finally. “That sounds pretty important.  Maybe…” She glanced at the foot of the front door. “Maybe we should have gone with them to help, if it’s that important.”

“Nah.”  Robin sank deeper into the couch.  “They’ve got this. Mommom’s an athlete; she can body-check anyone who tries to give ‘em trouble.  Besides, you’re just a kid, and I’ve got to stay here to look after you.”

Macy wanted to say, “I’m not a kid,” but based on precedent that would result in her immediately falling off the couch, which would probably cause her to spill her tea.  Instead, she said, “I guess you’re right.” After all, she had decided on a whim that adventure was bad, and what kind of person was she if she didn’t stick by that decision?

* * *

“You’re a genius, Pugliacci!” exclaimed Boss Gasket as she furiously shook his paw, causing his whole body to vibrate.  “This plan is amazing!”  She slapped him on the back, halting his shivers. “I’m so glad I don’t have to show you our retirement plan.”

T.V. tugged at the collar of the suit he was wearing and always had been wearing and likely always would be wearing.  Since the tech stored in the warehouse they were hiding in was obsolete, the company that owned it didn’t bother to air condition it properly, meaning the air was warm and musty.  “What, hehe,  _ is _ the plan?”

“We steal the Mergence of Destruction and use it to—” her explanation dissolved into static once more.  “Of course once we take it we won’t have long, so we should hold off on that part until everything else is ready.  That should be about fifteen years, give or take a hot sauna. It all depends on the Mergence.”

“<It’ll be in a box like this,>” said Allowance, her mustache now ten times as massive and her voice two octaves higher.  She held up a box identical to the box that was almost identical to the box that should have housed the Mergence. “<I made this one myself.>”

Gasket produced another box, slightly lighter than the other and with a less shoddily-rendered pattern.  “Since the real box could be locked or alarmed, you should just swap boxes.”

T.V. walked over to them, picked up a box in each hand, and switched them around.  “Now what?”

“Now take that box down to Vault C, in the warehouse basement.”  She snapped her fingers, and Allowance phased straight down through the floor without moving.  T.V., startled, fell backwards and clattered against a rack of cleaning supplies someone had left in the middle of the warehouse floor.  “And pick those up,” finished Gasket.

Then T.V. blinked twice and the vision ended.  He was back in the supply closet, covered in cleaning supplies, while a worried Allowance glanced furtively out the cracked door.

“I think I know where to go,” he said, picking himself up and fixing up the cabinet behind him.  He took some duct tape out of a poncho pocket and covered up a crack in the shelf. “They took the box down to Vault—.”

“I saw,” hissed Allowance.  “But I think some of the guards heard you crashing down at the end there.”  She leapt into the air and tackled him through the floor, phasing through to the level below — and into a break room filled with armed dogs and rainicorns, playing cards and drinking orange soda.

There were five tense seconds while the people in the room looked around in confusion, before the first knife was thrown.

Allowance immediately shoved T.V. out of the way, going partially intangible so that the knife phased through her.  T.V. had never been more glad he’d married an athlete. He didn’t have much time to be glad about that, though, as the rest of the gangsters were taking out their weapons — judging by how many had them close at hand, the card games had gotten heated — and advancing toward the two interlopers.

T.V. landed sideways on the ground; the impact knocked the breath out of him.  Instinctively he twisted and shoved off, boosting himself into a sprint. He saw a glint out of the corner of his eye and ducked as a second knife grazed his ear.  He turned his duck into a roll to dodge under a swinging baton, kicking it out of the assailant’s hand as his wife caught up and knocked them back with her horn.

She picked T.V. up and attempted to charge intangibly through the wall, but instead she smacked into it and crumbled on the ground, clutching her forehead.  An unfamiliar rainicorn in a red-and-black jacket came through the wall — they must have been the one to block Allowance. They lowered their horn toward her neck and started charging a bolt of rainbow-sprinkle energy at the tip.

Enraged, T.V. picked up the rainicorn by the shoulders.  The effort felt like it would burn up his back, but he ignored this as he stepped in a small circle, swinging the rainicorn over his head before flinging them at the approaching gangsters.  They all landed in a heap accompanied a loud crack, buried now by broken tables and scattered playing cards. Clearing her head, Allowance took the opportunity to pick up T.V. once more and bust through the room’s actual door with her shoulder.

T.V. didn’t wait to catch his breath; they began racing down the hallway as he took from his pocket the map they had stolen when they first snuck into the facility.  The blaring of the alarms, the pounding of armored feet, and the distant echoes of escalating infighting did nothing to drown out the warm sound of his heart in his ears.  His shoulders involuntarily flexed, causing him to almost drop the map as he unfolded it and attempted to chart a course to Vault C.

“Take a right up here,” he said.  “There’ll be an elevator—”

She held up a hoof to stop him, resulting in an accidental clotheslining as he failed to look up from his map in time.  Glaring down at him were two chihuahuas in complementing brown-and-blue uniforms, although only one had a black-and-red armband; each held a silver rapier perfectly upright.

“Oh hey,” said T.V., forcing himself to sound unreasonably casual so that he wouldn’t sound unreasonably panicked.  “I remember arresting you guys. You’re the Sisters Sergeant, the self-proclaimed greatest duelists in the Cry—”

“Silence!” barked the one on the left, her brown eyes gleaming with hate.  She turned to Allowance, sword still held high. “Ve are ze Sisters Sergeant,” she said dramatically, “ze greatest duelists in ze Crystal Dimension.  I am Joëlle.”

“And I am Noëlle,” said the other, her blue-grey eyes gleaming with excitement as she stepped forward to match her sister.

Then, simultaneously, they shouted, “And ve are here to strike—” they crashed their swords together, each keeping one hand behind their back as if to demonstrate how little effort they needed to put into defeating the peons before them — “jou down!”

Sighing, Allowance reached up to the ceiling, tearing off a piece of piping with an ear-splitting creak, and clasped it like a baton at the ready.  “<This shouldn’t take long.>” T.V. continued studying the map.

He had to roll to the side to avoid being kicked as Noëlle danced backwards; he bumped into a wall, aggravating his already aching shoulder, and decided to sit up.  The two fencers were just like he remembered — Joëlle kept Allowance on the defensive with precise thrusts and agile parries, never moving half an inch more than was strictly necessary; Noëlle weaved in and out, leaping dramatically over Allowance’s powerful tail and getting in weak but cumulative jabs on non-vital areas to throw off her opponent’s concentration.  It wasn’t regulation fencing and it certainly wasn’t dueling, but nobody told them that twice. It was all Allowance could do to focus on blocking the most threatening attacks, relying on partial intangibility for everything else.

Unfortunately for the Sisters Sergeant, Allowance was an athlete and knew a thing or two about fighting.  She let Noëlle score a non-critical hit, and in the moment between the rapier making contact and the fencer making her next move, she smacked her with her rear hoof, knocking her into the wall.  Free of that distraction, she was able to focus on Joëlle’s movements, sweeping her paws out from under her with a deft hoof-swipe and knocking her on her doggy rear. Noëlle, enraged, charged forward, only to get blinded by a nonchalant tail attack.

T.V. traced the planned route with his claw.  If his guesses about where most of the guards would be stationed were right, then this path would give them the best chance to retrieve the Mergence quickly without running into too many, especially if the ever-growing sounds of infighting were any indication as to the level of cohesion the forces in the warehouse had.  “Alright,” he muttered, taking a pen out from one of his poncho pockets, “let’s just make sure—”

Then a silver rapier came down right in front of his face, tearing through the flimsy map like a butterknife through knifebutter.  His eyes slowly moved up from the point of the rapier, along the arm where tufts of fur were torn off from the strugger, past the necklace with symbolic inlaid rhodonites, to the furious face of Joëlle Sergeant.

Right before her eyes rolled up as she was clonked on the back of the head by Allowance’s bar.

Allowance reached out a hand to help T.V. up; he gathered up the map pieces in one hand and accepted her help with the other, attempting to clear his mind so he could focus on the heist rather than the image of the rapier in front of his nose.  “You really did take care of both of them pretty quickly,” said T.V. “I thought it’d take longer.”

“<So did I,>” Allowance confessed between deep breaths, “<but Noëlle went down pretty easily.>”

T.V. did a knee-bent head-tilt.  “Really? That doesn’t sound Like Noël _ look out! _ ”

Noëlle, who had been lying on the ground behind Allowance, suddenly sprung up from her feint of a faint and jammed her rapier into the crack in Allowance’s horn.  Whether this was an uncharacteristically precise thrust from the chihuahua or simply a stroke of bad luck, nobody could say. Either way, the rainicorn screamed in pain and clasped her horn as the fencer stood smugly above her.

“Zat’ll teach jou for standing in ze vay of ze Sisters Sergeant, ze greatest duelists in the Cry—”

T.V. whacked her on the nose with the rolled-up map halves.  She spun around and ran away, wiping her face with her black-and-red armband.

“Let’s go,” wheezed T.V., slinging Allowance over his shoulder.  “Aw geez, you’ve got a lot of muscle.” He began trudging down the hallway until he came to a set of closed elevator doors; he set Allowance down, took out the duct tape from before, and wrapped it around her horn.  “That should hold it in place.” And he let himself pant, tasting the dry air of the warehouse, the hormonal smell of fear, and the million other scents that his powerful rainicorn-dog nose and tongue could pick up on.

T.V. had barely collected his breath when Allowance sprang into action once again, phasing her head through the elevator doors.  She poked out just long enough to say, “<It’s below us,>” before jumping through entirely; after a few moments, he heard an electronic ding, and the doors opened to reveal Allowance floating in an empty shaft as promised, holding onto a series of thick cables.

“It’s time to hack the elevator,” said T.V, reached into his pockets to pull out out a tool Jake Jr. had always made fun of him for bringing everywhere — a large diamond hacksaw.  He leapt into the elevator shaft, grabbed onto the cords, and started hacksawing. With Allowance’s considerable help, he was able to sever the cables; Allowance caught him just as he was about to fall, and they heard the elevator car hit the bottom with an uncomfortable, echoing crash.  Allowance whisked T.V. through another set of closed elevator doors below them, and he once again took the lead.

As he expected, the central hall of the basement was taken up by a large firefight between anarchists and Ruffians, each group presumably suspecting the other of having betrayed them in order to take the prize for themselves.  He and Allowance busted through a series of back doors to navigate around to Vault C without ever setting hoof/paw in the middle of that kerfluffle.

At last, they were there.  T.V. instantly recognized the ornate wooden box his mother had placed the Mergence in all those many years ago; it was placed near the edge of the room, perhaps to look inconspicuous among the piles and piles of unrelated paraphernalia.  He casually walked forward, picking up the box gingerly, as if it were a baby he didn’t want to wake.

Standing right behind the box, her face twisted into a smirk, was a familiar dachshund holding a wicked black blade.  “So it  _ was _ you,” she snarled.  “That was gonna be my fourth guess.”

“Oh hey, Ms. Gasket,” said T.V. in the tone of voice one would use upon greeting a casual acquaintance in a grocery store.  “You mind if I take this box?”

“Yes.”  And then she swung at him.

T.V. barely had time to dodge the worst of it.  The jagged crystal still sliced his arm, sending a shooting pain up his veins.  He had already learned the hard way that crystal was painful; that foreknowledge didn’t make it any less so.  The box fell out of his hands as he winced, backing up, his tail between his legs. He took a roll of gauze and some antiseptic from one of his pockets and began dressing his wound.  The sting of the antiseptic felt like a gentle massage in comparison to the burning pain of the cut.

As he was wrapping the gauze, feeling it moisten with blood, he forced himself to glance up.  Allowance was dueling Gasket as she had with Noëlle and Joëlle, but despite the Sisters’ claims, Gasket was clearly the better swordsdog.  She got Allowance off balance with a tricky feint and then shoved her back; she deflected an oncoming blow and then used the momentum to wrench the rainicorn-dog’s arm; she scored a slice on the cheek that leaked iridescent blood.

Soon, Allowance was backed up against a wall.  Sensing that playing defense was a losing game, she made a desperate jab, but distracted as she was from the pain of the cut on her cheek, she went off-center.  Gasket easily dodged the strike, grabbing the frog of Allowance’s hoof and twisting. The bar landed on the floor; the dachshund kicked it up into the air with her hind leg and caught it in her off-paw.

“Well, well, well,” she said as she tucked the bar under her arm.  T.V. silently got up and began creeping up behind her. “It looks like this is the end of the line.”  She raised the cassiterite blade and aimed it at the rainicorn’s throat. “Unless you can give me a reason as to why I should let you live.”

Suddenly T.V. leapt forward, landing right behind Gasket and taking out a piece of duct tape.  He reached over her head and stretched it over her eyes. She effortlessly shimmied her sword in front of her face and sliced the tape in twain, but that was enough of an opening for Allowance to escape; dashing between Gasket’s legs, she grabbed T.V. and the box and left the way they came.

Getting out proved easier than getting in.  If there had only been two groups, then by now guards would be swarming every exit point, but instead they had conglomerated into the center of the facility for easy infighting.  It was a cinch to navigate smaller passages and maintenance hallways to work their way back to the side entrance they had come from. In fact, despite the throbbing from their various injuries making it difficult to keep a careful eye out for patrols, they didn’t run into anyone else until they reached said entrance.

Standing there, leaning on his mace as if he had been waiting for them, was a rainicorn with a rhodonite necklace and a glorious handlebar mustache.  The sight of the mustache immediately sent shivers down T.V.’s spine, more so than even the blood loss. He stepped behind Allowance and trembled.

The mustachioed rainicorn threw his maul to the side and opened the door, gesturing for them to go through.

Never one to look a horse’s gift in the mouth, T.V. dashed out the door, Allowance at his heels.  It was only when they were around the corner, panting and heaving in a back-alley and further dressing up their wounds for the trip home, that he allowed himself to ask the obvious question.  “Why did he let us go?”

Allowance turned back to face the door, a wistful expression on her face, as her husband applied a bandage to her cheek.  “<Perhaps there is something he views as more important than success.>” She didn’t sound like she was sure what that meant, so he didn’t bother asking.

After taking no more than thirty seconds to slow their racing hearts, they began to head back to their house, taking side streets and detours partly to avoid getting odd looks and partly out of a paranoia that wasn’t entirely rational.  Every passerby with a designer handbag could be a Ruffian, every pedestrian with wild hair and a twitch could be one of Lee’s anarchists, every shadow could hide an enemy. T.V. didn’t let himself take more than half a breath at a time.

He was looking behind, checking for the fifty-seventh time that they weren’t being followed, when he crashed into a halted Allowance.  He turned around to see her trembling as, from behind a dumpster in the side alley they were cutting through, two dogs stepped out wearing armored jackets with colorful polka-dot patterns and ornate hard hats.  One, a creamy-brown bulldog, held two mean-looking rhodonite daggers; the other wielded a large, two-handed crossbow.

“Hey, Bulcinella,” said the one with the crossbow.  “Look what just dropped into our feeding-bowls. It’s the grand prize.”

“Sure is, Pugliacci,” agreed the one with the daggers.  “A bit dry in the nose, too. Looks like the universe is repaying us for our patience.”

Pugliacci side-eyed his companion.  “No, it’s not the  _ universe’s _ doing, it’s the  _ plan’s _ doing.”

“Don’t not thank the universe,” warned Bulcinella.  “That’s bad juju.”

“Look, can we just beat them up and take the Mergence?”

“Only if you admit—”

And then Allowance hit Bulcinella with a blast of rainbow-sprinkle energy, knocking him on his doggy rear.

* * *

Four hours earlier…

Pugliacci and Bulcinella stood perched on the roof of a house, observing the front door of T.V. and Allowance’s domicile.  Allowance was out of the house at the moment, but T.V. was still at home; they could see him moving around through the curtains.

“What do you think?” asked Bulcinella.  “Should we give him the ol’ one-two?”

Pugliacci shook his head.  “No, too risky. We don’t want this to come to blows if we can help it.  Don’t want the  _ jisa _ ’s stallions on our fluffy little tails like they were seventeen years ago.  No, let’s go with the old traveling-salesman routine.”

“Remind we what we’re supposed to be selling?”

Pugliacci grinned.  “An offer he can’t refuse.”

* * *

“Well, zhe refused it.”  Pugliacci plopped down on the edge of the roof and sighed.  “I knew we should have made our move before those two kids entered the scene.”

“Well, it’s not like we could have realistically avoided that,” said Bulcinella.  “I guess this is just the universe’s way of—”

“Shut up about the globforsaken universe, man!”  Pugliacci turned to face away from his companion.  “It should have worked out. It was supposed to be simple, ya know?  Make him think we’d captured his wife, get him to follow us out of the house, and then he won’t have time to figure out that my boyfriend’s box is a fake.”  He glanced up at the infinite pink expanse and sighed. “Hey, are we the the bad guys, Bulcinella?”

“Nah, I wouldn’t worry about that.”

“Well, I mean, think about it.  We just tried to tell a retired detective we kidnapped his wife just to distract him from figuring out we stole a superweapon from his house.”

Bulcinella laughed and slapped Pugliacci on the back.  “Nah.”

Pugliacci turned around.  “Why not?”

“‘Cause nah.”  He grabbed a dagger from his fest and unscrewed the hilt; the dagger concealed a flask.  He handed it to Pugliacci. “Here, why don’t you have some tonic water to calm your nerves, and then we’ll do  _ my _ plan.”

Pugliacci bottoms-upped the flask, wincing at the bitter taste.  It was like his tongue was being stabbed by some kind of stabbing implement.  “Alright,” he said, cringing. “But don’t blame me if you get knocked on your doggy rear.”

* * *

Bulcinella had just gotten knocked on his doggy rear, dropping his reflective red daggers on the ground.  Light was still leaking from the duct tape on the offending rainicorn’s horn as she doubled over and clutched her forehead.  The smell of garbage from the nearby dumpster seemed to intensify. Pugliacci readied his crossbow.

Just as he fired, T.V. tackled Allowance out of the way, taking a bolt to the arm that caused him to yelp and stagger.  The rainicorn-dog felt a piercing pain that brought to mind similar pains in his past — damage taken during his last fight against the Ruffians, shrapnel from a crash go-karting with his dad, getting his arm stuck in a revolving door in the Wildberry Kingdom.  Still, a tiny part of him was relieved that  _ both _ of his arms had gotten injured; the asymmetry had been bothering him.

Standing up, Bulcinella grabbed two more daggers from his belt and threw them at Allowance, one after the other.  She tried to go temporarily intangible, but her horn flared up again and the daggers ended up trapped inside her; she let out a sharp whinny.  T.V. grabbed them by their hilts and shouted, “Now!” With a grimace, Allowance released the daggers; T.V. launched one at Pugliacci with unexpected speed, and it was all the pug could to to dodge out of the way.

As he dodged he heard a scrape, looked down, and saw that the dagger had grazed his precious crossbow.  Growling, he reloaded; this former detective must  _ pay _ .  Hurting an innocent person he’d be fine with, but hurting a poor defenseless crossbow was a step too far.

T.V. was glad he had only thrown the one dagger, for when Bulcinella lunged toward him he needed the other to block the bulldog’s attacks.  It had been over a decade and a half since he had needed to defend himself like this, so both his eyes and his arm were out of practice. Naturally, Gasket’s wound chose now to flare up.  It was all he could do to keep from howling in pain and stay focused on the fight.

Allowance scooped up the Mergence, which had fallen out of its box when T.V. had been hit with the crossbow bolt.  It didn’t seem to be doing anything yet, and she didn’t want to find out what would happen when it did. She was about to pick up the box too when she noticed her husband’s situation.  She flew over to him and attempted to pick him up; then she heard a crack, felt a sharp pain, and blacked out.

A second bolt from Pugliacci’s crossbow had impacted Allowance’s horn, causing another crack to spread across it.  T.V.’s own horn flared up empathetically, and he was filled with a blinding fury.

Thinking quickly, he dropped the dagger he was using to defend himself so he could grab both of Bulcinella’s wrists instead.  He reached up a leg and slammed his belt of daggers to the floor, twisted his wrists to make him drop the other two, and then kicked them all away.  He then flipped the bulldog over his head and into his companion, picked up Allowance, and ran down the alleyway. His back wanted to kill him worse than the thugs, but adrenaline pulled him through.

By the time Pugliacci had thrown the dumbfounded Bulcinello off of him, T.V. had kicked over the dumpster before them.  More affronted than enraged, he began clamoring over the heap of garbage bags, ignoring the tantalizing stench within. He’d have time to roll around in it later.

Behind him, Bulcinello moaned, “Hey, I think the universe is sending mixed messages.”

Pugliacci dropped to the other side of the pile, where he could just barely hear his quarry scampering off in the distance.  He took a large whiff, just barely able to make out their scent trail beneath the smell of garbage. “Shut up about the universe.”

* * *

Allowance had just regained consciousness when Macy, in response to T.V.’s furious pounding, and with some difficulty, opened the door.  He quickly rushed past the nut with no more greeting than a “Hello excuse me,” resting his wife on the rocking chair and dashing off to retrieve a real first-aid kit.  Allowance carefully rubbed her horn; she could feel a second wrapping of duct tape around the newer of its cracks. She sighed. This would  _ definitely _ cut into her field time.  Coach would not be pleased.

Suddenly, she felt a strange vibration in her hands; she looked down and realized she was still holding the Mergence.  Panicked, she tossed it up into the chandelier and attempted to dash into the kitchenette where T.V. was passing through with the first-aid kit; she felt a tug at her back, like all feeling was being sucked from her body, and it was all her husband could do to drag her out of the range of that ferocious pulling.  She turned around and saw what she had feared: In place of the Mergence, there was now a swirling vortex of color from which emanated muffled cackling.

Allowance collapsed on the ground once more.  Numbness overtook her. The pain from her various injuries barely registered; even her twice-broken horn gave her little more than mild irritation.  She looked down at herself and noticed that she was greyscale. She heard screams from the living room which she knew should have worried her, but it registered as trivia, about as interesting as the steam lines on the window.  T.V. must have been brewing tea.

T.V. glanced up briefly from tending to his wife; he saw the swirling mass of color, drawing all the saturation in the room toward it and then sucking it up, and in that moment something clicked.  “The Mergence!” he shouted. “I think it’s some sort of anti-magic device!”

“That’s really fascinating,” Macy shouted back, desperately clinging onto the endtable, “but how do we stop it?”

“Why don’t you try making it all one color?  The chroma differential is augmenting its power; that’s why rainicorns have such powerful magic.”

Macy nodded first to T.V., and then to Robin; the young rainicorn-dog, who had knocked the rickety old couch onto its back to use it as a bunker, began zapping the frenetic spiral of chromatic destruction.

Then there was a loud sound like a glass thunderclap as the world went dark with color.

Macy held onto the chalcedony endtable, her fingers aching from exertion.  “Hurry up!” she shouted to Robin, her voice equal parts panicked and limp. She couldn’t even slightly make out Robin’s no-doubt snarky response, nor whatever T.V. shouted in further response to Robin.

The topic was no mystery, for she could still smell the blood that had been soaking Allowance and T.V.’s sloppily-bandaged wounds.  She felt like the smell should have made her retch, as the sight of Blondie Palmerson’s body had; her comfort gave her a strange pang of guilt.  She thought once more of the state of the office when she had found that body — papers and furniture in disarray, everyone around her in a state of confusion apart from the eerily-silent killer, the one sword sticking out of his body like a flagpole.   _ Ah yes, there it is.  Took me a minute, but we got there eventually. _   The convulsion nearly caused her to let go.

She was snapped back to reality by a sound she was surprised she could make out over the cacophony stirred up by the prismatic whirlpool in the middle of the room — a knocking at the door.  The gruff voice on the other side exchanged some shouts with T.V. which Macy couldn’t quite comprehend. Then Robin said something about Bigfoot before losing zhir grip on the couch.

The scream of “Who _ agh _ !” that exited her friend’s mouth Macy understood without any difficulty.  Without thinking — or perhaps thinking quickly, she couldn’t say for sure — she grabbed the still-flickering lamp, suspended over the endtable by the torsion between the Mergence’s vortex and a surprisingly sturdy power cord, yanking its cord out of the socket and throwing the whole thing at Robin.  It shattered against zhir torso before being vacuumed up into the vortex, but Robin was pushed back enough to regain zhir footing on the even-more-faded couch.

Then, too, late, Macy realized her folly:  No longer holding onto the endtable, she was pulled into the vortex.

“<SOON>,” Lee’s voice bellowed from the Mergence, as Macy was drawn inexorably toward it.  She blindly reached out with her feet to find something — anything — to anchor herself down with.  Something caught, but it wasn’t heavy enough and simply got pulled with her instead. An eye appeared in the center of the vortex and opened up.  “<I’M GONNA TURN THIS WHOLE WORLD INSIDE-OUT.>”

Macy managed to grab onto the chandelier, but with her weight added, she could  _ hear _ that it wouldn’t be long before it was ripped off the ceiling.  She was equal parts terrified and excited.  _ Huh, that’s odd. _   She knew she shouldn’t be excited, especially after learning firsthand what the stakes for situations like this could be, but she was anyway.  She looked down, adrenaline pumping through her nut heart, and saw what her feet had snagged — the fake sandwich box T.V. had angrily chucked earlier.

Then she grinned uncontrollably.  “Hey, Lee,” she shouted over the rushing sound of color, “looks like you bit off more than you could chew!”  She let go of the chandelier, tossed the box from her feet to her hands, and closed it around the sandwich.

Instantly the coloration in the room went back go normal.  All the debris and scattered collectibles from the now-empty display cabinet fell unceremoniously to the ground, along with Macy (still clutching the box) and the chandelier.  She heard a loud thump right next to her head, turning to see that Robin had righted the couch and was now helping her up.

“Are you okay?” zhe asked, tears in her eyes.

Macy nodded, still too high from adrenaline to know whether that was the truth.

Robin’s face brightened instantly.  “In that case, that was  _ awesome! _   You threw that lamp like  _ who-pah! _ and then grabbed onto that chandelier like  _ hi-yah! _ and then smacked that box over him like  _ ker-chomp!” _   As zhe made the sound effects, comic-book-style onomatopoeia manifested in the air around zhir head, their colors much more muted than they normally would be yet their dynamism striking nevertheless.

Macy laughed.  That  _ was _ awesome.   _ Adventure is good, _ she decided.

Then Robin and Macy looked at each other, eyes widening, as they suddenly remembered they were not the only people in the universe.

Macy placed the box back on the cabinet, careful to avoid stepping on broken glass, and ran over to T.V. and Allowance.  The rainicorn was beginning to regain her color, but since Macy hadn’t seen her lose it in the first place, to her it simply seemed like she was much more desaturated than when she had last seen her thirty seconds ago.  “Oh my glob,” she said, “is she going to be okay?”

T.V. pressed a paw against his wife’s chest for a full ten seconds before answering.  “I think so, yeah,” he said. “Her breathing’s returned to normal, and if this is anything like Shive’s Hypochromia, she’ll regain her color after about a week or two if she eats her greens, her blues, her reds, her—”

Weakly, Allowance put a hoof to her husband’s lips.  “<We get it,>” she groaned; whether it was a groan of physical weakness or merely annoyance, Macy didn’t know enough about Korean inflection patterns to judge.

On the other side of the house, Robin opened the door to see two familiar faces — a pug and a bulldog, both looking mighty angry.  “Didn’t I already tell you off?” zhe groaned. “This is really not a good time.”

“Oh, I’ll show you a bad time,” said the bulldog.  “Just wait until—”

Then, with a single blast of rainbow-sprinkle magic, the two dogs were launched away.  The magic’s source, a majestic rainicorn Robin knew well, flew up to the door in a huff, panting.  “<I just flew in from the southeastern grasslands and boy are my arms tired,>” announced Lady Rainicorn.  “<I got your message, Robin. What happened to the Mergence?>”

Robin gestured lazily to the display cabinet.  “<We found it again.  Well, Poppop and Mommom did, and then Macadamia shoved it back into its box.>”  Zhe shrugged. “<I didn’t help much.>”

Lady flew over to the cabinet and retrieved the box, then went to check on T.V. and Allowance.  “<Oh dear. It seems you have a lot to fill me in on.>”

* * *

“It seems you have a lot to fill me in on,” said Boss Gasket, guiding her allies out of the smoldering electronics warehouse.  After a lot of shouting, she had managed to convince the two sides to stop trying to slice each other to bits, but not before an unfortunately-placed grenade started a fire with some very noxious fumes.  “But that can wait.”

“Jou said jou knew who ze intruders were,” said Noëlle, pushing her unconscious sister on a mattress tied to a pallet jack.  “Vould jou care to enlighten  _ moi _ ?”

“Use your brain, you sword-nogginned simpleton,” barked Gasket.  “It was obviously that detective T.V. and his athlete of a wife. They recovered the Mergence, and I highly doubt it’ll be as easy to steal it back the second time around.”

“Zen ve lost,” sighed Noëlle.  “All of zis vas for nossing.”

“Not nothing.”  Gasket withdrew her blade, now glowing with a faint crimson light.  As she held it upright, the subtle shadows it cast on her face made her seem alien, especially with her predatory grin.  “That detective may have made a fool of me, but from now on, nothing he does can escape my vision.”

* * *

“<We have to assume nothing we do can escape their vision,>” said Lady.  She had laid Allowance down on the rickety couch, gently placing a pillow under her head; once again Macy was impressed at how comfortable the rainicorn managed to look, even while half-unconscious, on the dilapidated piece of furniture.  “<The Mergence will need to come to Ooo again, but this time under even  _ more _ vigilant care than before.>”

“<Who can we charge with its protection that won’t begrudge us potentially putting them in the target of an alliance between two dangerous criminal organizations?>”  T.V. chewed his claws. “<Someone who’s both strong enough to defend it and generous enough to accept the danger that comes with it.>”

“<Preferably… someone… far away…>” added Allowance, barely lifting her head.

Macy did a knee-bent head-tilt while standing on the seat of the smooth couch; Robin partially unshrunk zhir neck to lean into Macy’s ear and whisper an abridged translation peppered liberally with “…or something”s.

Then Macy’s face lit up.  “I know who we can ask,” she said, holding her finger up as if she were about to say, “The  _ ceiling _ can watch over the Mergence!”

Lady, T.V., and Allowance all stared at her, suddenly going quiet.  At first she thought they were judging her, harsh critics furiously writing down notes about everything they hated from Macy’s latest stage performance, even Robin shaking zhir head in disappointment as zhe managed the spotlight.  Then Allowance let out a feeble cough, and Macy was yanked back into the moment. There was an important decision, and they were honestly awaiting her contribution.

She swallowed hard, as if banishing the daymare down her throat, before she spoke.  “Finn Mertens,” she said at last, the words coming out like they were being held at crossbowpoint.  “Finn Mertens,” she repeated more forcefully. “He’d love to help.”

For a moment, she thought she had said something wrong; then Lady nodded eagerly.  “<I was just going to suggest the same thing,>” she said.

“What?” said Macy.

T.V. spoke up, in English for Macy’s benefit.  “If I’m remembering the dates right, Finn’s going to be at the Life-Sized Miniature Golf Invitationals tomorrow.”  He turned to Lady. “You were going to go there anyway, so you may as well bring the Mergence with you.”

“Plus me and Macy,” added Robin.  “I bet she can’t wait to talk to Finn face-to-face, in person, about all sorts of hero junk, now that she’s officially saved a day.”

Macy felt heat rising to her cheeks.  “Oh, I don’t know if I could do that.”

“You’d better,” Robin warned, narrowing zhir eyes.  Macy nodded politely, not wanting to ask what exactly zhe meant.

“<We can head out in the morning,>” said Lady, adjusting Allowance’s pillow.  “<For now, let us catch up as a family. We don’t do that enough, I feel.>”

“I’ll go make us some grub,” T.V. offered, walking into the kitchenette.  As the aroma of soon-to-be-cooked foods filled the air, Macy slipped off the couch, landed face-up on the floor, and sighed with relief.  The adrenaline was wearing off, everything ached, and she was going to be just fine.

* * *

A dimension away, Charlie lay in a hospital bed, hooked up to a series of life-saving yet menacing machines that hummed and beeped and bubbled as a cream-colored dog in a pleated pink dress with a white silk bow in her hair held her hand, talking in a melodious voice as if delivering a sufficiently stirring soliloquy could rouse the sleeper from her slumber.  A name tag placed crooked on the front of her dress labeled her a visitor and, less importantly, “Viola”.

“…anyway,” she was saying, blinking away the tears from her eyes, “that’s what’s been going on in my career.”  She paused, as if waiting for a response, before continuing. “On a more, eh, personal note, I met a cute girl today.  I think I might ask her out. Yes I  _ do _ mean it this time,” she scoffed.

A beat.

“Sorry, I know you only lashed out because you loved —  _ love _ — me.”  She patted the comatose patient’s cheek admonishingly.  “You just wanted to push me out of my comfort zone. Oh!”

She rummaged through the fuchsia purse at her side, pulling out a small snowglobe.  Her trembling fingers struggled to close her purse’s sun-shaped magnetic latch properly.  She shook up the snowglobe and set it on the bedstand by Charlie’s head; inside was a replica pyramid of light reddish-brown stone, next to a crowned green statue with torch held high.

“I saw this in a gift shop and thought you might like it when you wake up.   _ If _ you wake up,” she corrected herself.  She let the conditional hang in the air a bit before continuing.  “Also, I got a prismgram from T.V. Sounds like the Rhodonite Ruffians are back in business, and they tried to make a move for the Mergence of Destruction.  Oh, and Robin stopped by to visit, which is a rare occurrence. The enby’s a real free spirit, like you.”

She sighed.

“Look, I’d love to stay longer, but, eh, I really do need to go.  I promise I’ll talk to you soon, sis, okay? Let me know if you wake up.”  She stood, gave her a lick on the cheek, and slowly walked out of the room, pausing every few feet to look back on the tranquil yet viscerally uncomfortable form of Charlie.

If her eyes had been better, if they had been wizard eyes, then she would have noticed that she had not been the only person in that chair.

Charlie — some projected part of Charlie, at the very least — sat there playing a game of solitaire on top of her own comatose meat-body.  “Bye, sis,” she said to nobody in particular. “I love our chats.” And then she turned her attention to the game.

She turned over the top card in the deck.  Jack of diamonds goes on queen of hearts. Move ten of spades to jack of diamonds; reveal two of hearts.

“So the Crystal Mergence is back in play.  That could get dangerous.”

Next card.  Five of clubs.  Worthless.

“The Ruffians don’t know what it’s truly capable of; I doubt anyone alive does.  Anyone  _ alive _ .  Hrrm.”

Next card.  Three of spades could go on four of hearts, but no.  Two and four are showing; if ace and three show up, she wants four free.

“Robin is like me, eh?  I wish I’d gotten the chance to know zhir.  If I recall correctly, zhe is a dreamwalker, so perhaps I will.”

Next card.  King of hearts goes in free slot; move pile containing queen of hearts.  Reveal ace of hearts, put in ace row; reveal nine of diamonds, put on ten of spades; move eight of clubs to nine of diamonds, revealing three of hearts.  Two, three, and four of hearts move to top row.

“Perhaps I’ve finally shuffled a winning deck.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Charlie, you weren't even supposed to be _in_ this chapter, what are you doing?
> 
> So yeah, that's my followup to “Lady Rainicorn of the Crystal Dimension”, now with 90% less Lady Rainicorn. This chapter was actually the first to be written in just a week, as well as the first to get two full revision passes, which are two achievements one wouldn't normally expect the longest chapter to have, but there you have it. I think a lot of the reason it was so quick to write was because so much of it was actually the extended action scene — I took a day off to choreograph it, and once I did that it was super easy to write. It also helped that I knocked out the first 5k+ words in just one day; establishing the Crystal Dimension was fun.
> 
> I don't think it's a spoiler to say that all of this will come back eventually, but it might take a while. Obviously I wouldn't have spent so much time describing the Crystal Dimension, especially Fort Eisenkiesel, if I didn't intend for it to come back, and there are some blatant teases that both the Ruffians and the Mergence will have a role to play soon. There's one passage here in particular which foreshadows a major part of Macy's character arc; try to guess what it is, and I'll reveal the answer in the next chapter's endnotes if I remember that I said I would.
> 
> Now you know why I had that scene with Phoebe and Cinnamon Bun in the last chapter — I was setting up the Life-Sized Miniature Golf Invitationals! I actually went back and edited that chapter as I was writing this one (but before it went up so no need to check back) because I had to change the timing of that event. Scheduling, in-universe or out, is not my strong suit.
> 
> I should probably say something about the direction I'm taking T.V.'s character.
> 
> Anyway, here's your preview for the next chapter:  
> If something like this happened on an adventure, if she got caught thinking about something else while fighting a giant monster, it would seize the opportunity to lash out with its whiplike tail and — nope, she’s doing it again.


	6. Big Mini

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Macy, Robin, and Lady head over to the Life-Sized Miniature Golf Invitationals for a rendezvous with Finn.
> 
> Part 3 of “Flight of Fancy” 8-parter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm writing this AN at the last possible moment, so I'll be brief. [Cloudburst](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20492459) (which I referred to previously by its working title Behind the Sky) by my alpha reader Emmyllou is finally being posted. It's a really good Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell F/F romance fic with a good mix of magic, adventure, regency hijinks, and, of course, romance. Go check it out.
> 
> Anyway, on to the chapter itself. This one isn't as long or as potentially triggering as the previous. Things are starting to really move forward with the main character's arc and the plot of the 8-parter. The next four chapters after this one all flow together in one contiguous arc, so if you're the kind of person who waits and binges this might be the chapter to stop a binge on.
> 
> Here's your discussion prompt for this chapter: What sort of hole would you want to see in a life-sized miniature golf coure?

“—all I’m saying is it’s a little disappointing,” said Macy as she crested the hill, shielding her eyes from the morning sun’s glare.  “Just compared to, you know, that whole thing with the pond and the mercury.”

“Well, I’m sorry the universe has set out to disappoint you personally,” teased Robin, coming up behind Macy and then draping over her like a scarf.  “Does it jangle your balls?”

Laughing, she rolled her shoulders, knocking the rainicorn-dog off; zhe landed on the dewy morning grass and rolled around in it.  “That’s not the expression,” she said as she readjusted her hoodie.

Robin sat up, shaking flecks of grass and mud out of zhir fur.  “Don’t fall into the trap of linguistic prescriptivism, Macy,” zhe warned.  “Language is a subjective thing.”

“관측 언어학은 전체 인구를 고려할 때만 일관된 철학입니다,” Lady Rainicorn countered, bringing up the rear of the party toting a picnic basket and duffel bag.  “다르게 말하는 한 사람은 규칙의 예외로 간주하기에 충분하지 않습니다.”

“Come on, grandnanny,” protested Robin.  “Let me _have_ this.  It’ll be funny.  Besides, if I get enough—”

“We’re here,” announced Macy, her hands in her hoodie pockets as she faced the two polychromatic equines.  She leaned backwards and began rolling down the grassy hill; behind her, coming into view as she fell, was a glorious spectacle of a place, resembling a walled city with a giant windmill, a narrow bell tower, a flying armada, an enormous fir tree covered in fake snow, and a hundred other discordant structures.  At the base of the hill was a great red archway with iron gates which led through the grey stone walls; emblazoned on the archway in letters of blue fire were the words, “STUPENDOUS HAL’S LIFE-SIZED MINIATURE GOLF & OVERSIZED CARNIVAL.” A sizeable crowd composed of denizens from most of Ooo’s various kingdoms was gathered at the base; at a windowed booth near the gate itself, a large frizz-frazzled frog in a denim jacket was struggling to take a headcount while typing frantically on a computer and glancing alternately at twelve different monitors.  The smells of freshly-fried abominations wafted from the other side of the wall, enticing Macy as she rolled to a stop at the foot of the hill and sprang up with practiced ease.

She turned back to her companions, waving them along as followed after her in more measured pace.  If Macy didn’t know better, she would have sworn that they weren’t terribly intrigued by the prospect of tumbling down a hill in an uncontrollable whirlwind of speed.  _Grown-ups._

The frog in the booth waved his hands to the side in two sweeping arcs.  “Invitees on the left!” he shouted, his voice cracking. “Visitors on the right!  Invitees, get your envelopes out!”

The crowd began parting; Lady split up from Macy and Masse and began rummaging through the side pocket of her duffel bag.  Macy tripped over several different people, and several different people tripped over her. Robin had to shrink zhirself to make zhir way through the crowd; zhe had to zig-zag to avoid being stepped on.

“My left and right, not yours!”  The two halves of the crowds switched sides smoothly, like a well-choreographed dance troupe.  The frog raised a webbed hand high over his head and slammed it down on his keyboard with a cry of “Welcome to Stupendous Hal’s!”  The massive gates swung inward with a mighty groan, and the two crowds walked into the park.

As large as it had seemed from the top of the hill, Macy didn’t appreciate quite how massive the park truly was until she had seen it from within the great walls.  It stretched for miles, she was sure; in the faint morning mist she couldn’t distinguish the far end. She gazed about in wonderment, propelled forward more by the crowd surrounding her than by her own legs.  “Life-sized” didn’t do it justice; she felt like she herself was but a miniature, surrounded by windmills, koi ponds, and even food trucks three or five times the size she was used to. On the side of the brick-paved walking path she saw a ring toss game the size of an elephant; on the other side, a creature made of mud was selling corn dogs the size of Robin.

Speaking of Robin, Macy suddenly heard zhir calling her name.  After taking a moment to remember how her body worked, she turned around to see that Robin had rejoined Lady, who was hanging out in a gazebo with a sizeable group of people Macy assumed to be the other invited golfers.  Robin and a few others were waiting on the near side of a velvet rope, chatting with a few of the golfers. “Get over here!” the rainicorn-dog shouted. “Come on, don’t forget what you promised me yesterday!”

Macy didn’t have the presence of mind to chastise her friend that _no_ , she actually _didn’t_ promise anything when she noticed that one of the golfers chatting at the velvet rope was Finn Mertens, wearing a red-based plaid suit and tie with a matching scally cap, a steel putter in one hand and totally missing the other at the elbow.  Following Robin’s gaze, he looked toward Macy, a large smile forming under a short blond mustache and beard that he must have been growing out since the royal banquet, and waved at her with his stump.

Macy ambled over in a trance.  “Heyfinh heromai,” she breathed.  Robin danced a swirl of red and green in front of her eyes, snapping her back to attention.  “Hello, Finn,” she corrected herself, holding out her hand for him to shake — her non-dominant right hand.  “I’m Nakadamia the Mutt.”

“I know,” he said brightly.  “Your friend was just telling me about you.”  There was a pause as he shifted his shoulder uncomfortably, unsure of what to do next, and Macy realized why a split second before he did; she switched her outstretched hand for her left one, and this time, actually being in possession of a counterpart, he shook it.  “So I hear you want to be a hero?”

“Yeah, and she wants you to teach her,” offered Robin.

“What?”  Macy took a step back and glared at Robin.

“It was all you talked about for years, dude.”

“ _That_ nerd?” came a nasally voice from behind Macy, making her jump several feet in the air and nearly yank Finn’s remaining arm out of its socket.  She spun around to see a short, green-skinned humanoid about her height with a metal eye like Izak’s, a metal arm like Finn’s, and a metal leg like a telescope; his banana-yellow hair was in a messy tousle she was sure must have taken hours to get right.  “If you want to be a _real_ hero,” he sneered, pointing at himself with his cyborg thumb, “you should talk to _me_.”

“Hey, Tiffany,” Finn said.  Whatever animosity the boy held for Finn clearly wasn’t mutual.

At the mention of “Tiffany”, there was a stirring in the middle of the golfers’ crowd as Jake the Dog, who had been nuzzling with Lady Rainicorn, stretched himself over the intervening people to stand next to Finn.  “Tiffany!” he cheered. “You’re out of jail again!” He smirked, leaning on the velvet rope; Finn had to reach out quickly and grab the pole it was attached to in order to stop it from collapsing. “Did you come to cheer me on?”

“I’ll have you know, Jay T. — I mean, Jake,” he said, his robotic eye whirring as he glared, “I was invited to be a participant in this tournament!”  Then he looked off to the side, tapping his hands together bashfully. “Then I lost my invitation in a motorcycle chase, which I also lost. So, to answer your question, yes.”

“In that case, do you want to help carry my stuff?”

Tiffany put his hand up to his forehead in a salute and sniffled.  “It would be my honor, sir.” Then they both doubled over guffawing.

Macy glanced around blankly.  “What’s happening exactly?”

Finn gestured to the other side of a gazebo, where a goblin in a black leotard was waving golfers one at a time onto a large green that ran alongside the windmill.  “The Invitationals are starting. Because there are so many golfers, they don’t offer complimentary caddy service, so it’s a lot easier of the golfers have a friend to carry their bags for them, just so their putting arms don’t get tired.  Arm, in my case. Of course, that means they’d have to follow them around all day, and I’m a strong guy, so I didn’t—”

“I’ll do it.”  Macy didn’t know what had compelled her to make this offer, but i that instant it seemed like the best way to get close to her biggest hero.  Besides, she’d come too close to death too recently to be timid.

“Oh.”  Finn seemed almost as taken aback as Macy felt.  “Well, that’s not nece—” Robin jabbed him in the ribs.  “I mean, sure thing, thanks!”

“So the mighty Finn finally admits he’s mortal?” came a voice from higher up than Macy had thought to look; glancing up, she noticed a tall, lithe water elemental with cyan skin and a mustard-yellow toga crouching on the roof of the gazebo, a much smaller and pudgier elemental perched on her shoulder.  “I never thought I’d see the day you let someone else carry that weight.”

Finn leaned against the brass pole and looked up, cupping his hand over his eyes to block out the morning sun’s glare.  “Oh come on, Canyon, it’s not like that. I haven’t been that immature kid for a long time. I know when I need help and when I don’t.”  He sounded amused, not annoyed; in fact, this whole time, Finn had lacked any of the nervous tics Macy would expect of someone about to participate in an Ooo-wide invitational.  Even Jake was jittering one leg, his short tail pointed straight back.

“What, you mean like how you didn’t need help sealing that monster under the sea floor?”  She wagged a Finn-sized finger like a metronome, smiling playfully. “Don’t you know hoobris is a mortal folly?”  Macy was pretty sure that wasn’t how the word was meant to be pronounced.

Finn shrugged, closing his eyes as they were denied the shade his hand could no longer provide.  “I was probably going to have to leave the Night Sword down there anyway. You’re just jealous that I didn’t invite you.”

The goblin in the leotard called Canyon’s name; she slowly climbed off the gazebo roof, lowering her shoulder so the nereid on her shoulder could jump down.  “Well, I’ve gotta go set the bar for the rest of the golfers, but I’ll catch up with you after the hole. Bye, Finn!”

“Bye!”  As he was waving, he lifted the velvet rope; Macy walked under, followed by Tiffany and Robin.

“Hey, mommom,” whispered Robin as zhe approached Lady Rainicorn and picked up the duffel bag she had set on the ground.  “Have you talked to Finn about the you-know-what yet?”

“주위에 너무 많은 사람들이 있습니다,” she whispered back.  Robin nodded in acknowledgement, then withdrew a sapphire putter from the duffel bag and handed it to her.  The goblin called her name, and the two walked off, leaving Macy and Finn with a dwindling crowd of golfers.

“So, Finn,” Macy said, inspecting his steel putter.  She was extremely nervous about talking to him, but she wasn’t going to get _less_ nervous so she may as well.  “I was wondering what you could tell me about being an adventurer.”

“Oh, uh, I’m not really sure where to start.  It’s… hard, I guess? There’s a lot of danger to it.  But as long as you keep your way, and don’t let your judgement get clouded, you can do a lot of good.”  He tugged at a strand of long blond hair escaping from under his cap. “I don’t know, is this helping at all?”

“Not really,” Macy confessed.  “I guess that was kind of a vague question, though.”

“Bah!” shouted Tiffany, making Macy wince as her ear slits rang.  “If you want to get real advice, you should talk to me, Tiffany Oiler!”  He closed his eyes, grinned a self-satisfied grin, and held up a finger. “The first thing you need to know about being a *real* hero is—”

“Jake!” the goblin shouted.

“Come on, Tiff,” said Jake, snaking an arm around the boy’s shoulder as he corralled him to the green.  “Let’s go get our butts kicked.”

Macy turned back to Finn.  “What’s _his_ deal?”

Finn let out a sigh that sounded like he’d been holding it in all morning.  “I have no idea.”

* * *

Macy grabbed a ball marker from a pouch the goblin had given her — rich cobalt with a white chevron — and swapped it with the pocked white golf ball next to the hole.  She removed a tape measure from the pouch, stretched it, then stood up and called to Finn. “Six point five inches!”

She and Finn met about halfway, then stepped to the side to be out of the way of the other golfers.  “That’s pretty close,” he said, satisfied. “I should be able to come in at par for this hole. Not a _great_ start, but not a bad one, either.  Say, who’s up next?”

Macy shrugged.  “How should I know?  Whoever’s furthest from the hole, I guess.”  She stretched the top if her hoodie to form a temporary vizor, glancing toward the middle of the green.  “I think it’s that person who looks like a king made of flame.”

“Oh, that’s Flame King Phoebe.  Hey, Phoebe!” he called, waving his stump; Phoebe, focused on her practice swings, didn’t wave back.  Finn gave Robin a sly nod. “We used to date, you know.”

With a fiery streak, Phoebe swung the charcoal putter — Macy found it odd that no other style of club was allowed, but she supposed it could hardly be called life-sized _miniature_ golf otherwise — and rocketed the ball almost straight up into the sky, out of sight.

A beat.

With a quiet whistling followed by a loud bang, the ball impacted the green, creating a fiery explosion centered on the hole.  She and her caddy, a large blue cinnamon bun, ran through the smoke to inspect the result; when the smoke cleared, she was stooped over the hole, confused.  The caddy pointed with his spear toward a second, smaller hole; she reached in, pulled out a singed golf ball, and threw it on the ground in disgust, her head temporarily transforming into an inferno.

Macy did a knee-bent head-tilt.  “Must have been quite the interesting dates.”

Finn glanced up at the drifting smoke.  “We were both a bit unstable, back then.  Cinnamon Bun turned out to be much better for her, and she was good for him too.”  As he said this, the cinnamon bun — possibly Cinnamon Bun, though that was just a guess — put a firm hand on Phoebe’s shoulder, calming her down and bringing her head back to a normal head size and shape.  Amazingly, with the exception of the additional hole, the green itself was unscathed.

She gave a crackling sigh.  “Stupid wind. That shot would have been perfect!”

“We’re probably going to have to mulligan,” Cinnamon Bun mused in a voice like if Lisby the butler were capable of not sounding ridiculous.  “There’s no way to hit the ball from the bottom of that hole.”

“Or is there?” boomed Canyon’s voice, leaning over the green and casting a shadow over half of it.  Macy wasn’t sure how she kept forgetting she was there.

Cinnamon Bun looked up at her.  “No.”

Smirking, she turned to the nereid on her shoulder.  “Cragg? Do your thing.”

“Alright!” exclaimed Cragg as she jumped down, landing next to the hole; a spritz of water on impact made Phoebe flinch away.  She put her hand on the ground next to the hole, and it caved in, its sides receding into a sloped muddy crater; as Cinnamon Bun placed a red-and-orange marker in the center of the crater, Cragg stuck a hand out to Phoebe.  “Cragg Ambrosia, future hero of Ooo, at your service!”

Phoebe reluctantly shook her hand, visibly wincing.  She leaned on Cinnamon Bun’s shoulder as they walked off to wait for their next turn.  Cragg, unaware of this, leapt back up onto Canyon’s shoulder with a splash sound.

Without turning her head to look at Finn, Macy asked, “Do you have _any_ idea what that was about?”  Finn didn’t get further than “Canyon’s appr—” before a familiar voice came from behind to cut him off; Macy whirled around on one leg to see Tiffany riding on Jake’s back, arms crossed.

“Networking!” Tiffany cackled.  “And a very poor job of it, too.  Why, if I were me, I would have a network of criminal and non-criminal connections stretching all the way across Ooo by now.”

Macy held up her finger and wiggled it back and forth, trying to mentally rearrange the words Tiffany had just said into a coherent thought.  “But you _are_ you.”

“Exactly!”  He bent over to look Jake in the eye, pointing at Macy.  “What did I tell ya? This one. This one gets it.”

“I really don’t,” Macy said.

Tiffany executed a textbook dismount, then tripped over his own foot and faceplanted in the dirt.  As he got up, he slapped Jake on the rump; with a whinny, the dog ran over to where Lady Rainicorn and Robin were hanging out.  “If you’re gonna be a hero,” Tiffany insisted, approaching her with a sauntering gait, “you’d better hope your brain is as smart as your mouth.  Otherwise, you’ll end up dead, like me!”

“You’re dead?”

“No, because I was rescued by the altruistic-yet-ultimately-sociopathic Doctor Heidrun Gross, who gave me these awesome cyborg enhancements that I use to do awesome cyborg stuff.  Like… this!” He held up his metal hand, which morphed into a disco ball and began to shine various colors while playing atonal synthesized music. Macy had to admit being impressed; his dancing may have been awful, but he managed to keep the disco ball entirely stationary.

Macy turned to Finn.  “WHERE’S _YOUR_ ARM?”  She had to shout to be heard over the music, which seemed to be a high-speed remix of a Bumpy Pumpkins ballad, although country music was never her forte.

“I ONLY WEAR IT ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS!” Finn shouted back.  “IT AIN’T NATCHY!”

Then, with a gasp, Tiffany shut off his disco ball, morphed his hand back, and pointed at the hole.  “Roly poly!” he exclaimed, his eyebrows ascending to within the blond forest that was his hair. “The champ just scored a hole in two!”

Macy turned around _again_ , nearly slipping on the twirl-slicked dirt beneath her heel but bracing herself against Finn’s arm stump.  She saw a massive human woman in a ripped purple shirt — three hundred pounds of pure muscle, she was sure — dash with blinding speed down the green and inspect the hole.  She stomped the ground next to the flag; this was enough pressure to cause the golf ball in the hole to launch high into the sky. With a flick of the wrist, she caught it on its return descent, to a round of cheers from the other golfers and other onlookers and a respectable bout of clapping from the goblin in the leotard.

“Whoa,” gasped Macy.  She knew who that woman was without a doubt — one of the strongest heroes Ooo had ever known, a traveler who could shrug off any blow and best any foe and stub any toe.  She remembered hearing one story alleging that this woman had punched the queen of all dragons all the way to the Moon. “That’s Susan Strong! _She’s_ the champ?”

“No, of course not,” said Finn, looking at Macy with the kind of head-tilt reserved for creatures with necks.  “Susan’s terrible at this game. She loses the ball every swing. The champ is her wife.”

As he pointed down the green, Macy looked over and saw a much smaller woman, in a cyan shirt and cyan-eared dog hat.  She was much shorter and more lithe (lither?) than Susan, and her complexion was closer to a walnut than the peanut-colored skin Finn and Susan had.  She slung her putter — it had a glowing blue ring on the front and emitted a low electric hum — over her shoulder like a knapsack and clicked her heels together, causing wheels to pop up on the bottom of her shoes; she skated down the green and jumped into Susan’s arms, and with a mighty leap the giant woman carried her over the crowd, landing next to a vending machine by the start of the next hole.

“Frieda Strong is the first to finish Hole 1, at two under par,” announced the goblin in a monotone, holding a scroll up to his face.  “Next putter…” He squinted at the scroll. “Jack the God.”

“It appears I must depart, but fear not!” Tiffany exclaimed, pointing dramatically at the sky.  Macy hadn’t noticed before because of the angle he was standing, but apparently he had been wearing a purple-and-gold cape, which fluttered behind him as he posed.  “I, Tiffany, will return to teach you more of the ways of adventuring!” And then with a pirouette he bounded over to where Jake and Lady Rainicorn were chasing each others’ tails.  Tiffany gestured to Robin, who gave a countdown on zhir fingers; then the two tackled their respective golfers simultaneously so that Tiffany could drag Jake onto the green for his turn.

Macy nearly slipped again doing a knee-bent head-tilt.  “Is it just me, or did he not—”

“He didn’t teach you anything to begin with,” confirmed Finn, stabilizing her.  “I have no idea what he’s talking about.” Macy was glad that the two of them had something in common.

* * *

Macy squared her hands, trying to judge the opening shot Finn was attempting.  It was a tricky one — through one open window of the windmill and then out the other side — but if he did it right he wouldn’t need to hit it through the oversized rain-gutter that was the centerpiece of the hole.  So far every golfer had attempted it except Canyon, who had opted to play it straight, but only Frieda had succeeded. “I’m surprised the windmill is part of the second hole,” she commented. “I figured it would be saved for later.”

The tightness in her chest whenever she addressed him was still there, but he was a much chiller guy than she had expected.  She found it easy to slip into a sense of familiarity with him. She could easily imagine the two of them heading out together to take care of some monster.  He’d be driving some teched-out vehicle Princess Bubblegum invented, and she’d be struggling to hold a map upright against the wind. She’d spot an egret and make Finn pull over so she could snap a picture of it; Pen would be so jealous when she showed him.  The egret would pose as if it were in on the joke, raising its leg high in the air before stomping hard on the ground and kicking up dust. Macy would breathe in at the wrong moment and start coughing; Finn would sit her down on his lap and give her a lozenge, and they’d settle down for a midafternoon snack…

“…another one recently,” Finn was saying back in the real world, “so that makes a total of _three_ holes that involve the windmill.  I haven’t actually played the newest one yet.”  He had already swung.

“I’ll go mark your spot,” said Macy.  “You go, uh, catch up with Jake or something.”  She ran off before he had a chance to reply. How could she slip up like that in front of her hero?  She needed to get away a bit to clear her head and make herself feel less useless.

The unpainted door of the windmill was high off the ground; even the bottom threshold was three full inches of raw granite.  _Who’s ever heard of a brutalist miniature golf course?_ thought Macy as she sized up the stunt she was about to attempt.  She rubbed her hands together, took a deep breath, then ran toward the door, jumping at the last second and then pushing off the door itself to gain enough height to reach the brass handle a third the size of her body.  She grabbed onto it, her momentum causing her to swing at the same time it drew the door open with a mighty creak. Then she let go of the handle, crumpling her legs as she landed so her shins wouldn’t hate her, and dashed inside.

Macy wasn’t sure what was supposed to be on the inside of a windmill, but she was pretty sure the answer wasn’t “a concrete pyramid with a sloping path around the outside taking up the majority of the real estate”.  On one side of the pyramid, she could see a tunnel which was occasionally blocked by the shadow of the windmill’s blade, with an exit on the other side shaped like an aqueduct; that must be where the later hole crossed through this one.  The pyramid was designed such that any ball which failed to clear the interior would meander down its outer path in a square spiral before being deposited back out the side where the course began. Finn’s ball hadn’t come out, though, which meant it was still somewhere in here.

Grunting, she hauled herself up the pyramid.  She nearly lost her footing on the first level, scraping her foot against the rough cement.  She guessed this was why they called it brutalism. She imagined herself scaling a mountain of cement, a vicious architect constantly pouring more at the top.  She wasn’t sure what an architect looked like, so she imagined Ambassador Corn wearing a hardhat and safety vest instead. She struggled to get a foothold on the next rocky ledge; a mountain jay flew up next to her and took out a bag of popcorn.

“Is this funny to you?” she asked angrily, pulling herself up and bracing against the next layer of rock to give herself a moment of respite before further ascension.  “Do you think you could do it better? Is that it?”

The jay spread its wings and spoke in Tiffany’s scratchy, nasally voice.  “I have tool use!” Then it flapped its wings with a mechanical whirr and flew up the mountain.

Macy glanced around frenetically, hoping to one-up this cocky corvid.  “Well, I have, uh, a hard shell!” She switched tactics, hugging the mountain more closely than she had been taught when Princeso had brought her and the other orphans to a rock-climbing wall.  Her friend Masse had hugged the wall as he ascended, giving himself numerous bruises and necessitating this warning. However, Macadamia was a tough genus, so the scrape of the mountain didn’t affect her at all.

Then she reached for a rock and, finding nothing but air, was shoved back into reality.  She had ascended the pyramid, where Finn’s ball now rested on a flat surface at the very top.  Miraculously, it had lost its momentum here rather than rolling down the pyramid.

Macy let go of the concrete, swapped out the ball for a marker, and rolled down the pyramid.  She gingerly closed the door behind her, then called over to Finn. As she tossed him the ball, she shouted, “You’re in a good spot!” to which he gave her a thumbs-up (well, a thumb-up, anyway).  Then she located Robin and sidled up to zhir. “So, uh, did you see what’s on the inside of the windmill?”

“I got a glance, but what I’m more interested in is the door.”  Zhe conjured a miniature diorama of Macy’s stunt to get the door open, with the part of Macy played by an indistinct brown swirl.  “Cool trick, by the way.”

“Thank you.”

“Anyway.”  Zhe shut off the diorama.  “This place is supposed to be _life_ -sized miniature golf, but the whole thing seems to be _larger_ than life.  What’s up with that?”

Macy had been wondering the same thing herself; hearing the question come from someone else illuminated an answer.  “Well, what sort of person would want to make a bigger version of miniature golf?”

Robin massaged zhir forehead.  “I don’t know, maybe someone who’s compensating for a small eeeeego?”  Zhe drew out the last word like it didn’t belong there and zhe was surprised by its presence.

“No, think about the other golfers.”

Zhe rotated zhir head a full three hundred and sixty degrees.  “Someone who’s… on fire!” Her ruby eyes gleamed proudly.

Macy gave Robin an affectionate noogie, causing the rainicorn-dog to scratch zhir back with zhir hind leg.  “No, silly, someone _giant-sized!_ ”

“Oh.”  A beat.  “Like Susan Strong!”

“No, I meant closer to Canyon.”

Zhe tilted zhir head.  “I guess that makes an iota of sense, too.  By the way, was that a pyramid inside?”

“Yeah, for some reason.”  She grinned, remembering the exhilaration it had given her.  “I pretended I was on a mountain as I climbed it.”

“So _that’s_ what the yelling was about,” came a voice from behind her, accompanied by a strong smell of salt.  She whirled around, half-expecting to see Tiffany even though the voice was different. Instead, before her stood the nereid, Cragg Ambrosia.  Up close, Macy noticed two seemingly contradictory things about the water elemental, who was only half a head taller than Tiffany: Aside from her clothes she was made entirely out of water, yet she had somehow dyed her undercut hair with neon-green highlights.

“Sup?” said Macy in a deep voice, sticking out a hand.  “I’m Macadamia Jugland, she/her. You’re…” She squinted and looked slightly down, as if reading the nereid’s nametag like a fake-suave character from a twenty-first century sitcom.  “Cragg, right?”

“That’s right!  She/her as well, I think.”  She returned Macy’s handshake.  Her hand didn’t feel as wet as Macy had expected; it was more like shaking hands with living gelatin covered in condensation.  When they withdrew, Macy could feel the salt depositing on her hand as the water droplets evaporated in the southern spring heat.

“And I’m Robin, zhe/zhir,” added Robin, zhe/zhir.

“Oh, I know who you are,” Cragg said, flipping her hair and sending a mildewy mist into the air.  “I know all about the great-grandchild of the legendary Lady Rainicorn of the Crystal Dimension.”

“You do?”

She cracked a smirk.  “Nah, I just said that to sound cool.  I overheard you talking.” She turned to face Macy and whistled.  “And you! The first person to play caddy for Finn in years! The last time he didn’t carry his own bags, I hadn’t even been formed from the primordial chaos that give life to all water elementals!”

Macy chuckled.  “When was that, like sixteen billion years ago?”

“More like thirteen.”

“Thirteen… billion?”

“Thirteen.”  She cocked an eyebrow.  “Do you really think I look that old?  Is something wrong with my hair? My sister said it looked fine, but I can never tell if she’s just appeasing me, and I can’t count on Canyon for an honest opinion because she doesn’t care about that kind of thing.  Well, she _says_ she doesn’t, but I think—”

“That’s not it,” Macy interjected, waving her hands in assurance.  “I just… was confused.” She racked her brain for a way to change the subject.  “So you’re a ‘future hero of Ooo’, you said?”

“Yeah,” she said, rubbing the back of her head sheepishly as she somehow blushed.  “I mean, uh, thats the plan. For now I’m just Canyon’s squire. I help her out on quests, she teaches me stuff about survival and politics and fighting.  A lot of it goes over my head, but it’s cool. But I guess you wouldn’t want to hear about all that.”

“Yeah she would,” interjected Robin.  “Cause she wants to be a future hero of Ooo, too!”

“Robin!” Macy chided.

“Plus, she saved the world like yesterday, so she’s kinda _already_ a hero of Ooo!”

“ _Robin!_ ”  She put a finger to her lips and gritted her teeth.

Cragg stood slack-jawed; her mouth was open so wide, Macy could see her uvula dangling like a fish in the jaws of a gull.  “Holy carp, that’s awesome! I haven’t saved anything bigger than a kelp grove.” She lunged forward, her sudden speed startling Macy, grabbing the nut’s wrist before she could react.  Macy felt an unplaceable warmth flow through her body at the chilly touch — embarrassment, or something else? She stared at Cragg’s face, now twisted into a wicked grin and narrowed eyes.  “We’re gonna spar.”

Macy gulped.  She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came.  She wouldn’t know how to respond even if they had.

“Spar means fight,” Cragg clarified, as if she believed that had been the cause of Macy’s confusion.  Then she let go of her hand and leapt away in a splash, leaving behind the smell of the ocean crashing onto a rocky shore.

* * *

Macy pawed at the gangplank across which Finn was to send his next putt.  The wood, rough like the concrete pyramid, was damp from the splashing of the water below.  She pressed her hand into a particularly damp spot, then looked at Finn and shook her head. “No good,” she insisted.  “You’d lose way too much momentum.”

Finn sighed and reoriented himself around the ball.  “I’ve known you for two hours or so, but I trust your judgement.  I’ll just have to hope for another par. Alright, get back here.”

Macy immediately planted a foot on the moist patch she had been inspecting, lost her balance, and tumbled over the edge of the gangplank.

The sensation of tripping over the edge was a delirious rising where time seemed to slow down and speed up in equal measure.  It was so disorienting and unnerving that when she finally entered freefall, twisting her ankle painfully in the process, it was almost a relief.  Now she was plummeting face-first into the waters below, a mildewy concrete foundation on one side, the large wooden ship which comprised the next two holes on the other.  She could just barely register the stench of mildew and the disconcerting feeling of wind whistling past her ear slits before she closed her eyes and struggled in vain to rotate her body in the half-second before impact so that her face wouldn’t be the first part of her to smash into the water.

Then she felt a jolt as a strong arm wrapped around her and diverted her waterbound course.  A second later she was flying through the air, then landing with a soft thunk on the green next to Finn.  As he helped her up, she saw Susan Strong bound off the wall of the ship with a creak of wood and vault over the guardrail of the false marina.

“Are you okay?” Susan asked in a voice that sounded deeper than it actually was.  “You should be careful; golf is a very dangerous game.”

“I’m fine,” Macy assured her, although she handed Finn the marker so she wouldn’t need to go across the bridge.

“I’m glad to hear it.  It shows strength that you’re fine after nearly falling into rushing waters from rickety golf bridge.”  Macy was less fine now.

“Susan!” chided the champ as she walked across the gangplank to collect her wife.  “Quit scaring the poor child, you drama queen.”

“I’m not scared,” Macy lied.  Nevertheless, Susan looked appropriately contrite.

“Oh, get over here, you!”  Frieda had to leap onto Susan’s side like a frog climbing a tree to nuzzle her neck.  “You know I only scold you because I love you.”

Susan laughed as she walked back across the gangplank to await her wife’s next swing.  “It’s okay. I know I can be intense.”

“Yes, you certainly can,” sighed Frieda wistfully, now hanging off the giant woman’s shoulders and dangling her legs in the way a small child might when receiving a piggyback ride from a significantly larger child.

When they were gone, and when the attention had turned once more to Finn’s upcoming putt, Macy held one shaking arm in her other.  “Intense,” she echoed. “What am I even doing?”

“I don’t think you should fret too much about it,” Finn consoled her, reaching his stump down for her to hold as he teed up with his remaining arm.  She held it, and she could feel him grasping back; her jittering slowed. “Honestly, there are times when I still get nervous and scared. We’re all frightened little babies inside.”

“I’m not a frightened little baby.”

“Sure you are.”  And he hit the ball just past the new divot in the gangplank and onto the final stretch of the hole, right next to Frieda’s marker.  “That’s a birdie for sure.”

* * *

Macy watched the ball fly into the enormous clown-head at the start of Hole 6, bounce around the unnecessarily-detailed innards, tink against the flag, and land with and teeter at the edge of the hole proper.  She leaned forward, held back by the leotard-wearing goblin; her knees locked up with tension, causing her to lean against his arm, as she stared at the ball, willing it to budge. It came to a stop just at the precipice, and she felt a shout of frustration well up inside her.  Somewhere nearby, a magpie chirped.

Then the ball fell in, and the spectators, golfers, and most of all Macy burst into a raucous cheer, drowning out the goblin’s awed proclamation of “Hole in one for Finn Mertens!”  Even Tiffany yielded a reluctant nod of acknowledgement as he leaned precariously against the upright duffel bag containing Jake’s club and twenty enormous sub sandwiches.

“What’d I tell ya?”  Finn said to a mollified Jake.  “I know this hole like the back of my one hand.”

On his other side, Frieda gave Finn a friendly poke with the butt of her putter.  “You might actually be able to catch up at this rate. I guess I’d better start trying.”

“거짓 겸손은 당신에게 어울리지 않습니다,” Lady noted as Robin centered the ball for her putt; the rainicorn-dog was kneeling on zhir front paws with zhir rump five feet in the air, wagging zhir tail.  “아마 당신은 단지 질투심이 많을 것입니다.”

“Maybe I am a _little_ jealous,” Frieda admitted.  “But I’ll ace this hole eventually.”

Phoebe gave a whistling sigh as Lady sent the ball sailing right into the clown’s teeth, bouncing back onto its outstretched tongue.  “I guess that’s right.” The Flame King hadn’t had another outburst like at the first hole, but she was still ranked dead last by two points, a fact which seemed in turn to have a negative impact on her performance.

Macy leapt into the final section of the course, retrieved the ball, and leapt back out before she could allow herself to think about the design of what she was running through.  She tossed the ball to Finn wordlessly, only stopping for the merest moment to ensure he had successfully caught it before dashing into the bathroom and washing her hands furiously.  _Why did Stupendous Hal have to put such meticulous care into rendering a scaled-up clown’s internal organs?_   She wasn’t sure she would have been able to handle herself had Finn not aced that hole.

She pushed back the visions of giant clowns with gaping maws that she knew were threatening to overtake her even now.  If she focused on the awful smell of the bathroom, the off-putting checkerboard pattern on the walls, the mix-and-match assortment of soaps, she could distract herself.  All in all she spent five minutes in that bathroom refusing to hallucinate; by the time she came out, only Canyon (whose first shot had landed her right next to the hole) had not holed out.

“All better?” Robin asked.  Zhe had apparently been waiting for her outside the bathroom, along with Finn, Jake, Lady, and Tiffany.  Macy wasn’t quite sure why Tiffany was there, but she also wasn’t going to look a horse’s gift in the mouth.  “You were in there for a while,” zhe said.

“Mostly, yeah,” replied Macy.  “So what’s the next hole?”

“The best hole of all,” said Jake.  “The stomach hole! It’s lunchtime on account of we’re halfway through the course.”

Tiff held up the duffel bag.  “Jake brought sandwiches.” Macy could tell by the smell; how they hadn’t spoiled by now was beyond her.  The answer was probably something simple, like that the duffel bag was magic. She didn’t care how, though.  She was just glad that sandwiches.

* * *

“Did you really make these?” Macy asked between bites.  “They’re delicious!”

“I am but a humble conduit for the sandwich inspiration the universe deigns to grant me,” Jake replied, his hands morphing into a shape that was at once incomprehensible and a sandwich.

Suddenly Tiffany leapt onto the table and began gesticulating dramatically as he recited some manner of poem that was written on his arm.  “Just as the lion stalks the flagging gazelle,” he intoned, “the tongue of the true believer is ever searching for the perfect taste. The herd must scatter before the booming sound of sunset, making them ripe for the pickings.  It is not the flagging but the toil of the hunt which makes it taste so sweet. And just as the sweetness of ketchup is nothing without the savory decadence of choice meat, so too, does, uh…” He squinted at his forearm, pausing his frenetic motions.  “…so too does blessed inspiration from Grod above merely part the clouds for the artisan lion to prepare his master gazelle.” He bowed to a quiet round of polite applause.

Cragg, sitting at an adjacent table, leaned over to Macy and whispered, “Too bad the clouds didn’t part for that poem.”  Macy let out a small chortle before stifling herself in embarrassment.

As Canyon munched on her Robin-sized corn dog and Lady pulled Finn aside, Macy swallowed the last bite of her sandwich and went to throw away the ornate sandwich paper (it was covered in cartoony images of Fionna & Cake).  She tried to toss the paper into the garbage bin from ten feet away, but the breeze suddenly changed; it flew into Phoebe’s arm and incinerated, causing her to shudder. Macy plopped into the ground, leaning back against the gazebo column with her arms wrapped around her legs.  With all the golfing she’d witnessed today, she should have known to watch out for a wind shift.

“Talk to me.”  Robin’s voice came unexpectedly from behind the pillar, jerking Macy forward, but her seated posture was stable enough that she didn’t budge much beyond that.  “You’ve been getting increasingly mopey all day, and it’s not like you.”

Macy signed.  “I’m just feeling—”

“Nope.”

She turned to see Robin, her neck wound around the pillar, and blinked in confusion.  “Nope?”

“Nope.  Whatever you were about to say is wrong.”

“How can you tell?”

Robin ruffled Macy’s hoodie.  “Because you’re a twelve-year-old kid with average emotional intelligence who isn’t used to introspection.  You can’t accurately diagnose your own maladies without outside assistance any more than I can read facial expressions and body language from people I’m not intimately familiar with.”

“Then outside assist me,” she snapped.  “What’s _wrong_ with me!?”

“You’re feeling guilty about getting mad at your dad because you’re starting to think he’s right about adventuring, but you still want to be an adventurer, which is making you even feeling-guiltier.”  Zhe put a paw on her shoulder, and the nut could see tears impossibly forming at the base of zhir ruby eyes. “This is what I was worried about when you left. You’re tearing yourself apart, Macy”

Slowly, Macy stood up and hugged Robin.  “I’m so sorry, I wasn’t thinking about anyone but myself.”

“That’sh okay.”  Robin’s muffled voice reverberated through Macy’s shell.  “It’sh your prerogative.”

Macy pushed Robin back to arm’s length and stared zhir in the eyes.  She couldn’t let zhir stay like this; emotional maturity was disconcerting on Robin and she wanted it to go away.  She needed something to distract both zhir and herself. Plus, on the off-chance Robin _was_ right about how Macy was really feeling, she needed… she needed…  What did she need? And more importantly, could she find it at Stupendous Hal’s?

An idea occurred to her.  Turning away from Robin, she strode over to Tiffany, who was furiously scribbling yet another ode to the glory of hoagies on his own sandwich paper.  “Hey Tiffany,” she said, “this is a golf course _and carnival,_ right?”

“Stupendous Hal’s is the reuben with corn chowder of the buffalo-burger world of miniature golf courses!” Tiffany exclaimed without looking up.  Macy wasn’t sure whether or not that was meant to be in response to her.

Regardless, she brushed the sandwich paper aside, clenched his hand in hers, and looked him in his startled eyes.  “Then I challenge you to a test of strength.”

* * *

Macy, Tiffany, Robin, Cragg, and the rest of the caddies gathered around a massive bell tower that served as both a clock and a strength test.  Once Tiffany had accepted Macy’s challenge, others had decided to join in, and it wasn’t long before it became a _thing_.  The next hole, a sizeable hedge maze, was expansive enough that attempting to communicate with caddies would get cumbersome anyway, so the golfers went on ahead while the others stayed behind.  Finn had looked worried when he separated from Macy. She had meant to ask him why, but she was whisked away before she got the chance. That would probably weigh on her. The frog from the front gate — a sticker on his bulbous chest let Macy know his name was “Factspinner” — arrived to judge the contest, writing the contestants’ names on a notepad the size of a billboard.

Tiffany stepped up first.  He took the great brass mallet in his hands, with a whirring of his robotic shoulder and a cracking of his organic one, and hoisted it up.  Factspinner indicated in his throaty yet oddly melodic voice where the cyborg should stand; Tiffany struggled to keep the hammer from falling as he walked, although he refused to show on his face his clear regret at picking it up before being guided to the correct spot.  Then, with a mighty cracking shriek of “ _Behold the might of Tiffany!_ ” he swung it down hard on a black rubber pressure plate with concentric red-and-white rings that sat at the base of the bell tower.

The onlookers, Macy included, watched transfixed as a glowing yellow light ascended the bell tower floor by floor, visible only through circular windows on the side.  For a moment, it seemed like it could climb forever. Then it slowed to a halt about three-quarters of the way up the bell tower and began strobing as the bell at the top of the tower chimed.  “Thirteen for Tiffany Oiler!” Factspinner croaked as he noted the score with a pencil the size of the mallet’s handle. Tiffany held up his hand and morphed it into a disco ball, strobing in time with the light above and performing a victory dance Macy wasn’t sure she should be looking at.

After about ten seconds of this tomfoolery, Factspinner shooed the runt away and called for the next contestant.  Robin took the opportunity to pull Macy aside and talk to her behind a conspicuously normal-sized vending machine.  “What’s this all about, Macy?” zhe demanded. “One minute you’re all mopey, and the next you’re challenging Tiff in front of the whole assembly.  Not that I’m complaining about you feeling better, but what gives?”

Macy placed a hand on the vending machine, feeling the electric hum from inside.  It seemed alive to her. “Well, I’m gonna be a hero, right?”

“Are you?”  Robin tilted zhir head.  “I mean, after all this, I thought you were reconsidering.”

“Reconsidering?  If I were reconsidering I’d have gone straight home after the Mer—”  Robin placed a paw on Macy’s lips. “—I mean, after yesterday. I came here to gawk at Finn from a distance; all you did was shorten that gap.”

“Sorry about that.”  Robin slinked around Macy to lean against the side of the vending machine, zhir head pressing into the opening whence cometh beverages.

“Don’t be.  I think I needed that extra push.  And I realized that if I want to be a hero, I’ve got a lot of growing to do, and the first step in growing is seeing how I measure up.”

“So that’f what thif iv aboot.”  Robin’s head was now fully inside the vending machine, muffling zhir voice.  Macy could feel the vending machine’s heart flutter.

“Basically, yeah.”  A beat. “That, and something about Tiffany kinda cheeses me off.”

“Dv yvv rvvlv thvnk—”  Robin popped out of the vending machine and spat out a can of Super Porp.  “Do you really think you can beat him?”

“Maybe.”  Macy reflected on the events of the day.  “I don’t rightly know. But I’m pretty sure his arm was built for style, not strength.”  Then she stepped away from the vending machine, did a full spin, and crossed her arms. A smirk spread across her face.  “Besides, I’ve got an ace in the hole.”

Before Robin could express confusion over what golf had to do with tests of strength, Factspinner called zhir name.  Macy watched zhir race over to the bell tower, following behind at a relaxed pace. She stretched her arms, taking deep breaths filled with the scent of freshly-mowed grass and monstrous carnival confections.  Focusing on the competing smells let her clear her mind. She barely registered the crack in her shoulders as she exhaled. Her eyes tracked the brief ascent of the light from Robin’s round only on instinct. By the time she was a part of the real world again, she had subconsciously moved on to stretching her legs and Factspinner had written a giant “4” — the lowest score so far — under Robin’s name.

Macy continued stretching as the other contestants went up, one after one.  When it became clear the contest was going to be bigger than the two of them, Tiffany had brazenly insisted on going first, to “show you how it’s done;” that suited Macy fine.  She had elected to mirror his example and insist on going last instead, using this opportunity to observe the other contestants, seeing what strategies worked and what didn’t. Cinnamon Bun stood a bit farther back than the others so he could step into his swing, which netted him the first score to crest Tiffany’s.  Another caddy had attempted something similar by jumping in the air, but when the mallet came down close to the edge of the pressure plate, they wound up with a score barely above Robin’s. Susan Strong, on the other hand, did nothing special whatsoever. Her score was nearly perfect, at 17.

The second-to-last contestant was Cragg Ambrosia.  She strode confidently up to the pressure plate, eyes closed as if navigating by some manner of smarm-based echolocation.  When Factspinner tried to hand her the mallet, she held up a hand and said, “Is it okay if I go without?”

“You need to hit the pressure plate with a hammer.”

“Right, but does it need to be _that_ hammer?”  She pulled her hand back and hung it like a mantis claw.  “I’m pretty saline; I might corrode it.”

He pulled a massive tome out of — huh, Macy wasn’t sure _where_ he pulled it out of — and flipped through it.  “Technically, no,” he conceded. He put the tome back where he found it.  “But you don’t appear to have an alternative hammer on your person.”

“Don’t worry about that.”  She twisted at the hip in a manner that would make even a vertebrate jealous, pointed her head in the direction of the hedge maze, and cupped her hands to her lips; as she did so, they reshaped into a megaphone.  “ _Hey Canyon!_ ” she shouted, her amplified voice ringing in Macy’s ear slits and interrupting her squats.  “ _How much power can I use for this thing?_ ”

Canyon stuck her head over the wall of the maze (she must have been crouching before, Macy reasoned, presumably placing a marker or inspecting the hole) and shouted back.  “ _Fifteen percent!_ ”  That shout caused a wave of bending hedge that rippled throughout the maze.

“ _Okay!_ ” Cragg shouted in reply.  Luckily Macy was still covering her ear slits from last time.  Cragg turned back to the pressure plate, a wicked grin spreading across her face so wide that it was visible from her backside.  She raised her arms up into the air, balling her fists together, and they merged into a single hammer. Macy figured that hamer had about fifteen percent of the nereid’s body mass inside it.

Then she slammed it down.

There was a shockwave that knocked Macy onto her nut butt, accompanied by a popping sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once.  She shook her head, bracing herself on one knee while the world stopped wobbling before she dared to stand. She glanced up at the tower just on time to see the light reach the very top before the startling cacophony from the bell knocked her on her back again.  This time, rather than bothering to stand, she simply rolled into Robin and let zhir pick her up.

“How you feeling?” Robin asked, zhir form flowing around Macy’s and supporting her.

Macy took her lucky two-dollar coin out from her hoodie pocket and stood up, squinting through the pentagonal hole in the middle at the bell tower above and then at the pressure pad.  She put the coin back in her pocket. “Ready.”

Macy kept her hands in her pocket as she walked over to Factspinner, only taking them out to accept the hammer with a simple “Thanks, man.”  She stood a mite farther back than the spot he indicated — not as much as Cinnamon Bun, but she didn’t want to risk crossing it. Then she took a careful stance, one leg bent and the other twisted and outstretched.  She felt the springlike potential diffuse throughout her body. She took one last pair of breaths — sharp inhalation, hold while the smell of mortar and sweat filled her lungs, deep slow exhalation — and sprung.

She spun on her foot faster than she had ever spun before.  She heard a panicked yelp as Factspinner leapt backward. She nearly missed her window, slamming the mallet down onto the pressure plate at the last possible moment.  Yet it worked. She could feel the energy from her twirl flow through her arm, out of the hammer, and into the center of the pressure plate. Dropping the hammer, she took five paces back and watched the yellow light ascend.  Seconds felt like eons. Eventually, as with all things, it slowed and came back down to Ooo.

“Thirteen for Macadamia Jugland!”

* * *

The rest of the tournament proceeded as normal.  Robin got lost inside the bowels of an enormous ceramic cat; Jake and Lady kissed as the volcano that dominated hole ten erupted boiling water; Finn had a putter-duel with Frieda on a rotating windmill blade as Macy and Susan cheered their respective golfers on; Phoebe aced the haunted house hole by bouncing her ball off the Lich and proceeded to trash talk the other golfers through freestyle rap until everyone else had holed out.  Macy tried several times to get Finn to talk, but he seemed reluctant to discuss whatever it was that had been bothering him. Perhaps she had overestimated their familiarity.

Finally it was time for the announcement of the victors.  Everyone who was there for the invitational gathered around a small stage with three rows of folding chairs before it; the golfers went up onto the stage while the caddies and onlookers filed into the chairs.  Standing next to the other golfers, waiting for the goblin to tally up the final score, Finn looked as pale as a sheet. If Macy didn’t know any better, she would have assumed he was as nervous as the rest. Jake and Lady Rainicorn were holding hands while averting their respective gazes.  Phoebe was burning bright enough that Canyon had to cover her eyes. Only Frieda seemed unfazed, waving happily at Susan. The muscular woman looked ridiculous sitting in a metal folding chair next to Macy. Macy herself probably looked just as ridiculous, having slipped on the chair’s smooth surface and now resting on her side.  She could hear the sound of her shell rolling against metal in her ear slit.

Robin came up behind Macy, righting her before morphing into a seatbelt.  “You nervous?” came zhir voice from the buckle region.

“What?”  Macy cast her eyes downward and began tapping her foot against the ground.  “No. I mean, yeah, but not about the scores. I just came here to talk to Finn, remember?”

“So then what’s got you all jittered up?”

“I don’t know,” she confessed.  “I just feel like there’s something I _should_ be nervous about but forgot.”

“Hm.”

Macy slowed her tapping.  “‘Hm?’ What’s ‘hm?’”

Then there was a hiss like a pouring waterfall before Cragg’s voice came from behind Macy.  “The referee’s back!”

Indeed, the goblin in the black leotard walked onto the stage from a door in the back.  He rushed to the side of the stage and pulled open a much bigger door, through which stepped a massive hulking figure only a head shorter than Canyon, a beige trenchcoat covering their body, a tipped fedora and scarf covering their face.  As they stepped to the center of the stage and silently spread their massive arms ending in white-gloved hands, Macy knew. This was Stupendous Hal.

Then the goblin climbed over Hal’s back and unclasped a button on the front of the trenchcoat; the whole ensemble, hat and all, was carried to the top of the stage along with the goblin, revealing the man in all his glory.  Macy couldn’t hold herself back from exclaiming, so shocking was his appearance.

“He’s like three inches tall!”

Stupendous Hal was an eggplant-colored humanoid in a silver bedazzled suit and top hat gleaming with sequins, standing on a pair of massive stilts and holding two great mechanical arms in his own tiny ones.  As his trenchcoat fluttered away, he tapped a tiny lever on his stilt and stepped forward into a kneel, spreading his arms wide. A brief burst of trumpets came from hidden speakers surrounding the audience. Everyone except Macy and Robin, apparently used to this, gave a respectable if quiet round of golf applause.

He stood up, bowing, as those in the crowd who hadn’t been following the golfers all day threw fragrant roses the size of corpse flowers onto the stage.  Then he straightened and raised one hand, holding up three fingers. He pointed the other hand at Finn, who stepped forward and faced the crowd; the goblin descended from above to drape a bronze medal around his neck.  Everyone cheered. Macy pulled Robin off of her, standing on her chair and clapping. Then she toppled over.

By the time Cragg and Robin pulled Macy up, Stupendous Hal had already gestured for Canyon to step forward as the second-placer.  Her head being too big for the medal’s ribbon, she had the goblin place it over her upraised fist as a bracelet. Cragg’s whooping cheers from behind Macy made her cower until Robin jumped into her hood and morphed into earmuffs.

Hal made a circle with his uplifted wooden arm and held up one finger, pointing with the other arm at Frieda.  The human walked to the center of the stage casually, waving to the audience as they cheered. Macy found herself excited for the woman, despite having rooted against her.  She just looked so _happy_ , a big goofy grin plastered on her face as Susan blew kisses from the audience.

The goblin descended to place the shiny gold medal, noticeably bigger than the others, around her neck.  Unfortunately, Frieda was so skinny that the ribbon instead fell off her shoulders, the weight of the medal dragging her arms down until it got caught halfway down, trapping Frieda’s wrists around her waist.  She alternated between maintaining that cheerful grin and struggling against her latest accolade. The cheers continued as the rest of the golfers filed behind the three medalists and took a collective bow, followed by the medalists themselves.  Frieda attempted to get Finn or Canyon’s attention, but they were caught up in the moment.

As  the golfers filed offstage, Susan throwing Frieda over her shoulder, Macy remembered something.  _That must be why he’s nervous._   She grabbed Finn by his stump and led him away to the vending machine by the strength test; Jake shooed Tiffany away and followed, joined by Lady and Robin.  Finn followed without question. Caught up in the moment, rubbing a thumb on his bronze medal like Macy did with her lucky toonie, he didn’t have the presence of mind to resist.

When they were out of earshot of everyone else, she turned to face him and dug her phone out of her hoodie pocket.  “Hey, can I get your number?”

He raised an eyebrow at this, but he told her her anyway.  “Why?”

“Because I want you to call me if anything happens with the Mergence.”

Finn smiled and patted his backpack; as he did so, the flap shifted, revealing the back end of the jagged white sword he had been wearing at the banquet.  “I wouldn’t worry about that. I’m Finn Mertens, man. I’ve got Jake with me, and he’s got Lady on speed dial.” As if on cue, Jake latched onto Finn’s arm stump, morphing into a forearm and giving a thumbs-up.

Macy squinted at Jake for a moment before pointedly looking away and locking eyes with Finn.  “Still, though. I put the Mergence in the box; I feel an odd sort of responsibility for it.” The next words to come out of her mouth were not words she had planned on saying.  She paused briefly before saying them. Should she say them at all? Her mind whirled with indecision; her heart had already decided. “It’s my duty as an adventurer.”

“Mathematical!” Finn exclaimed, removing Jake as the dog morphed back to normal.  “I’m impressed by your moxy, and your commitment shows a promising sense of responsibility.  But, ah, how do I say this?”

“당신은이 슈퍼 웨폰을 추구하는 적들에게 10 초간 살아남지 못할 초보자입니다,” suggested Lady.

“Yeah, that.”

Macy did a knee-bent head-tilt.  “What?”

“The point is you’ve got gumption,” Jake explained, “but gumption don’t win wars.  If you’re gonna be a hero, you need to figure that out for yourself.”

Those words brought something to Macy’s mind; she replaced the phone and took out the toonie once more.  “You said something similar back when I got this,” she said, squinting at him through the pentagonal hole in the middle.  “Something about learning the meaning of charity and peace.”

She felt something slip between her fingers; she shifted the coin to see that Jake had morphed into a blue copy of it in her hand.  His now-five eyes, one perpendicular to each side of the central hole, blinked in succession. “Did I?”

“Yeah, back at the banquet.  You handed the coin to me after I dropped it, said something weird, and then left.”

He grew an arm so he could shrug.  “That sounds like something I’d do.  I must’ve forgotten. But let’s skip to the skedaddle:  You’ve got a lotta learnin’ to do before we can entrust you to be one of the Mergence’s guardians.”

“Then teach me,” she suggested as Jake pushed himself out of her grasp and turned back to normal once again.  “I can learn!”

Finn scratched the back of his neck, looking off to the side like something awkward had caught his attention.  “I’d love to, but I don’t think I’d make a good teacher. Peebs can testify that I wasn’t a good student. Plus it would be pretty counterproductive for me to train you while guarding the Mergence if the whole point is you’re not strong enough to help guard the Mergence.”

“Oh.”  Macy turned to look where Finn was looking.  One of the oversized paving stones was cracked; a hearty weed was growing in the crevice.  Macy had always been impressed by plants’ ability to grow where they weren’t wanted. Perhaps she was biased, being a plant herself.

Robin, on the other hand, was having none of it.  “Excuse you? We didn’t come all the way out here to be foiled by your low pedagogical self-estimation.  I dragged my friend to the Crystal Dimension and back so she could learn the ways of adventuring, and you are _not_ going to skewer that kebab like this.”

Finn raised his arms defensively and backed up against the vending machine.  “I’m not skewering any kebabs. I just think she should, uh…” He looked at his friend.  “Jake, help me out here, man, you’re way better at food metaphors than I am.”

“She should marinate in a different sauce!” Jake suggested.

“Sure.  What I mean is _I_ can’t be your teacher, but my _girlfriend_ could if you convince her.”

Robin shrank down to traveling size and rotated zhir face in confusion.  “Your girlfriend? How come I’ve never met her?”

“그녀는 문명과는 거리가 멀고 혼자있는 것을 좋아합니다,” Lady explained.  “그녀는 그렇게 너와 나와 같다.”

“Yeah okay that makes sense.”

Finn began rifling through his backpack.  “She’s living in the Evil Forest, preserving the balance of nature and all that.  If you can reach her, you can ask her to train you in the ways of — ah, here they are!”

He took out what appeared to be a silver signet ring and held it out for her to take; she stuffed her coin back in her pocket before accepting it, slipping it carefully onto her finger.  As soon as she did so, she felt a crackle of energy like spicy lightning flow through her. She was at the same time paralyzed and energized. He handed her a small red pistol and a clear-lidded box with eight red balls in it.

“A ring of recall and a flare gun,” he explained.  “I’ve also got a shortsword you can borrow if you want.  The ring’ll pop you right back to the Great Tree if you get into trouble, but it takes a while to activate.  If that’s not an option, just send up a flare and we’ll be there before you can say ‘magical ring of teleportation we stole from a genie.’”

“You mean _borrowed_ from a genie,” Jake corrected.

“Come on, bro, you know we never intended to give it back.”

As Finn explained how to use the flare gun, Macy’s thoughts drifted to Robin.  Had zhe really done all this for her? She recalled the state she had been in when she left Jugland, angry at her father for threatening to curtail her adventuring privileges.  It had seemed such an unreasonable demand, in contrast to the unfaltering support Princeso had showed her before then. Perhaps Princeso had been overly permissive, though. She thought again of — oh, wait, Finn was showing her what parts of the flare gun did what; she should probably pay attention.  She really couldn’t afford to get distracted. If something like this happened on an adventure, if she got caught thinking about something else while fighting a giant monster, it would seize the opportunity to lash out with its whiplike tail and — nope, she’s doing it again.

She looked up at Finn sheepishly.  “Hypothetically speaking, would you mind repeating all of that again, word for word?”

He sighed and obliged.

* * *

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you?” Robin asked as Macy stuffed her backpack with one more sandwich for the road.  “I’d be glad to tag along.”

“No, that’s okay.  Adventuring is my thing, but it was never yours.”  She turned to face the park gate, much smaller than the one she had entered from.  “So I just go until the rock-shaped rock and then turn right?”

“Yeah.”  Finn rested his hand on Macy’s shoulder; she leaned back to look up at his face.  He still seemed worried, but it was a worry mixed with anticipation and a measure of excitement.  The sword he had given her, white-bladed with intertwined roots on its handle, rested heavy at her side.  “The path is less well tended from there, but it’s still a clear path. From that turn it’ll be about five miles until her house.  It’s only about 4:25, so if you leave now you should be able to make it there well before sundown.”

“Got it.”  She walked up to where the path began to slope downward, indicating the watershed she knew must exist for such a dense forest to exist.  Then she turned around and placed a hand over her eyes, a mock salute to block the afternoon sun. “I’ll see you all later,” she said. Then she leaned back and rolled down the hill.

She walked at a brisk pace but not hurried, taking in the sights and sounds and scents of nature.  As the trees grew thicker, so too did the smell of sap. Squirrels and magpies larger than she was used to seeing poked their heads out of the boughs, observing her somewhere between prey sizing up a predator and predators sizing up prey.  The wildflowers had thorns. She kept moving.

By the time she got to the rock-shaped rock, her nut heart was racing.  She was exhilarated, to be sure, but she was also nervous. This seemed right, somehow, but that didn’t mean it felt natural.  Heh. As she leaned up against the rock, taking a swig from a water bottle Finn had given her, one thought raced through her mind over and over.

_I can’t believe I forgot to ask Finn who his girlfriend is._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And you'll have to wait three weeks to find out.
> 
> I cut a lot of other characters who were going to appear in this chapter, and I do mean a lot. B-MO, Shelby, Muscle Princess… I think at one point I even wanted Peebs herself to show up! There was also going to be more content for Phoebe & Cinnamon Bun, but there just wasn't enough room. Don't worry, FK fans, she'll get more focus later. I even have at least one chapter planned where she takes center stage. Granted, it's chapter 73, but hey.
> 
> There's a lot of symbolism going on in this chapter, but I'll leave that to y'all to figure out. Instead, I'll follow up on what I said last week about something being foreshadowing for something very big in Macy's character arc. That foreshadowing was her inability to sit properly on the couch, and it was foreshadowing that she is gay. Look forward to an exciting ninety-nine more episodes where she struggles to figure out her feelings! Except don't because that would get old fast. Besides, Macy'll be a teenager soon, and that means an end to those antics, right?
> 
> “But Paul,” I hear you not ask because nobody comments on this fic, “what about her crush on Masse?” To which I say, Macy grew up watching 21st-century sitcoms, where do you think she got the idea that she had a crush on Masse? I don't think he was mentioned all chapter. That might be different next chapter, hypothetically, I say having already written the next two and ninteen-twentieths.
> 
> Anyway, I'm short for time, so here's the preview:  
> Perhaps Robin had never even existed in the first place.


	7. Roughin' It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Armed with a flare gun, a magic ring, and the Root Sword, Macy attempts to travel through the Evil Forest to reach the home of Finn’s mysterious girlfriend, but she soon finds that the forest beasts aren’t the most dangerous part of the wilderness.
> 
> Part 4 of “Flight of Fancy” 8-parter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick heads-up, this will be another chapter with some pretty uncomfortable descriptions of violence and injury. If that's likely to squick you out, just be prepared.
> 
> Anyway, I don't have anything to say up top, so I'll just give today's discussion prompt. Talk about a camping experience that went horribly, horribly wrong. Double points if it's your camping experience, triple points if it's true.

Macadamia the Nut and Masse Yvoire sat by the edge of a babbling brook just outside the Candy Kingdom.  Macy wore a yellow skirt with a long-sleeved red shirt and black leggings, Masse had a blue-grey cardigan pulled over his white-chocolate body, and they were both covered in dirt.  Masse held a long stick that had fallen out of a gum tree, poking it into the water with a thunking splash; Macy watched intently as the swimming school of gummy fish, perplexed by the intrusion of the branch, slowed and flowed apart, mimicking the wake on the surface above.  The reflections of the trees on the far side of the creek wavered, and for a moment Macy thought it looked like the fish were growing from them. She shared that thought with Masse, and the two chuckled. As she laughed, the smells of outdoors filled her nostrils — the clean, only somewhat sugary air; the mix of minerals and algae from the crystal-clear soda water of the brook; the unpleasant yet not unwelcome smell of molting.  Out here, Macy could clear her head.

Behind her, Macy could hear Princeso’s special guests for the day, the Marshmallow Rangers, explaining the same survival tips for the seventh time to a group of hyperactive six-year-olds.  As a nine-year-old, Macy viewed six-year-olds as babies and twelve-year-olds as the elderly. Right now the rangers were explaining the difference between poison ivy and chocolate cake, as well as which one is better to build a shelter out of.  At least that’s probably what they were talking about. Macy didn’t bother listening because she doubted she would ever need to walk five miles through the wilderness to meet up with someone who could train her in the ways of being a hero, or for any other reason either.

“Hey, Macy,” said Masse in that carefree, confident voice of his.  He drew a circle in the water, and a spreading ellipse drifted downstream.

“Yeah, Masse?”  Macy reached her bare foot into the river.  A curious fish nibbled on her toe, tickling her; she pulled it out with a splash, getting her leggings wet.

“I’ve been thinkin’.”  He turned to her, swinging the stick around to point at her and getting her shirt wet.  “About fish, and how dumb they are.”

“I’m with you so far.”  She nudged the stick out of the way so she could stare down at her reflection.  Something seemed off about it, but she couldn’t figure out what.

“If we were to become hardcore adventurers like our M&M characters, and decided to live in the woods for like ever and ever, do you think we could trick ‘em into bein’ our food like the rangers were talkin’ about?”

“I dunno.”  Macy poked the water.  It felt warmer on her finger than she anticipated.  A fish went for another nibble; it stayed clamped onto her finger as she lifted it out of the water.  “They seem to think  _ we’re _ the food.”

“Maybe we could use that agin’ ‘em.  Make ‘em think we’ve got some food for ‘em, get ‘em hooked so to speak, and then bam!”  With his free hand he yanked the fish off Macy’s finger; distracted, he let his other arm move in a complementary arc, causing him to whack Macy in the back with the stick.

“Whoa!”  Macy wobbled her arms and knees, attempting to maintain her precarious balance on the edge of the rivulet.  She felt that heavy weightlessness that comes of losing balance.

And then she crashed face-first into the murky, slow-moving tributary.

As she got up, spitting water and moss out in a thick, wretched-tasting slurry, she took stock of her surroundings.  She had been resting on the edge of this stream, taking a breather to collect her breath and thoughts, when she had zoned out.  She figured she was about one mile out from the rock-shaped rock, which meant she had four miles yet to go before she reached Finn’s girlfriend at the heart of the evil forest.  She took out her phone to verify that.

“Fleas and lice!” she exclaimed.  The phone’s screen was a mess of colored boxes and glitching text.  She facepalmed at her own shortsightedness. Despite having the good sense to load everything else into her backpack, she had decided to keep her phone and flare gun in her hoodie pocket for easy access.  That was probably not her smartest putt. She had heard of a few tricks to fix this, but she couldn’t remember exactly what; she could just look it up on her —  _ oh. _

She pulled out the flare gun and poured two liters of water out of its barrel.  She was no expert, but she doubted that would work either.

The ring of recall on her finger buzzed with anticipation.  She could turn back now with no problem. At least, she assumed the ring was waterproof.  But she still had the Root Sword Finn had given her, her water bottle, and her wits, as well as several hours before the sun set.  If she was going to be an adventurer, she couldn’t let a little mortal peril faze her.

“Fleas and lice?” she repeated to herself, amused, as she walked back to the trail she had been following.  “Wow, Damy, you’re really starting to sound like Robin.”

* * *

A short while later, Macy smelled something odd in the air.  It smelled like rust and something vaguely unpleasant, carried to her nose on a warm and fetid breeze.  Whoever said that fresh air was clean was a liar.

Cautiously, she withdrew the cream-bladed short sword from its backpack-mounted sheath.  Her fingers wrapped loosely around the twisting wood handle, only tightening briefly to yank the branching crossguard free when it snagged on her grey hoodie pocket.  She held it pointed down, in front of her leg as she approached the spot where the scent seemed to originate.

As she neared its source — a thorny bramble bush — she stilled her breathing.  There were still the sounds of the forest, of winds and waters, of magpies and monsters, but none of it sounded nearby.  Either whatever was in this bush was trying to avoid detection, or…

Slowly, she parted some of the bush’s branches, revealing the odor’s origin.  A large brown squirrel, easily thrice the dimensions of a normal squirrel, was lying still on the ground, blood seeping from a gash on his arm.  The sickly red fluid was soaking into the ground and the squirrel’s blue polo shirt; bizarrely, the squirrel didn’t seem to be wearing pants. Granted, neither was Macy, but at least her hoodie doubled as a dress.

“Hey there, little squirrel,” she cooed, holding her sword awkwardly in her right hand so she could use her left to heft the creature up and out of the bush.  “I’ve got you.”

“I’m actually a shiba inu,” said the shiba inu.  “The name’s… the name’s… hrrgh!” They clutched their side, wincing convincingly.

“There, there,” she said, setting them gently on the gravel path and rifling through her backpack for her first-aid kit.

“…Ontario,” the dog on the ground warbled.

“Ontario, huh?”  Macy set the kit on the ground beside Ontario and opened it up with a click.

“Yeah, sure, let’s go with that.  Hnngh!”

Macy took some antiseptic and squirted it on a disinfectant cloth.  She began swabbing the wound, parting matted fur so she could determine the extent of the injury.  “That’s a very nice name. Very… huh.” She paused, looking off into the middle distance. There was something pressing on the back of her mind.  Something she was forgetting.

“Ooh, doc, you’re forgetting about me,” yelped Ontario.  She looked down and realized she had been pressing the alcohol-moistened cloth onto the wound for a mite longer than she assumed was standard.

“Uh, sorry about that.”  She placed the cloth in a plastic bag and squinted to inspect the wound.  “Looks shallow,” she guessed. How’d you get it?”

“I was walking through the forest, looking for, uh… I was walking through the forest when I got jumped by a monster.  I lost my knapsack, my composure, and my pants, and its gnarly claw gashed me. I’m a bit embarrassed that it caught my by surprise.  I should have seen the signs.”

“What was the beast that attacked you?” she asked, a nervous quiver in her voice.

“The signs.”

“Ah, of course.”  She took out a piece of absorbent cloth and laid it across the length of the wound, then began wrapping it in gauze.  “You know, you’re really lucky this was just a minor scrape.” A beat. “Otherwise I’d have absolutely no idea what to do in this situation.”

Once she finished bandaging up the dog, they got up on their hind legs, knees shaking, leaning on her for support.  She waited for them to find his balance and let go before she began packing her supplies. “If you don’t mind my inquisition,” she heard them ask, “where might you be headed?  It’s pretty suspicious to find someone wandering alone in the Evil Forest, you know.”

_ Same to you, _ Macy wanted to add, but she kept her mouth shut.  That was not how a doctor was to address her patient, she assumed.  “Just meeting up with someone who can hopefully help train me in the ways of hero biz.”  She slid the medkit back into her pack and resumed walking, sword out.

“Alrighty, doc.”  They sounded much better already — hale and hearty, and peppy as a puppy.  As they walked behind her, their energetic steps send gravel clattering with every pawfall.  “I guess I’ll tag along with you, then. Safety in numbers and all that.” Their voice drifted to the side at the end, as if he were leaning over to look at something.  “You’re my hero, after all.”

* * *

“Oh, but ‘tis nothing, citizen!” Macy exclaimed in a deep, projecting voice, gesticulating wildly with one arm while she kept the other tucked behind her back.  “I was merely doing my duty as a sworn protector of the Land of Full Cherry Termite.”

_ “Falscherrinertreich,” _ Masse coughed beside her, briefly looking up from the furious scribbling he was doing on a sheet of paper before him.

“That too,” clarified Macy.

“Even so, totally radical and noble warriors,” Princeso said in a thick Lumpy accent from behind the cardboard tryptich that sat in front of his chair, “I wish I could offer you, like, some token of gratitude more than just grody payment.”

“Magic weapons!” interjected Masse.

_ “Healing potions!” _ insisted a weary Robin, sitting on the other side of Macy with zhir own sheet resting on zhir head.

“Perchance a title?” suggested Macy.

“You know what, since I like you, I’m just gonna totally give you all three of those things,” said Princeso, making a dismissive hand gesture.  “Thanks for the ideas, but I was totally gonna do them anyway, so like what- _ ever.” _

Then Princeso began furiously rifling through pages of notes behind his GM screen while muttering to himself as Macy, Masse, and Robin exchanged confused glances.

“Alright, I’ve, like, got it,” Princeso said at last.  He took out three index cards — one green, one white, and one red.  He handed the green card to Macy. “Sir Fionn Mac Inteach, I give you the title ‘sky-warrior’, the longsword ‘moonslicer’, and three regular healing potions.”

As Princeso handed out the rest of the loot, Macy examined the card.  It was a pretty neat weapon — much better than her current sword, which she had been using since the beginning of the campaign.  Its magical bonuses to attack and damage were okay, but what caught her attention was a special ability it had. Apparently, this sword would allow her to attack at range, in a manner which would allow her to use the tripping feat she was planning on taking when she leveled up.  Princeso must have remembered when she mentioned that offhand and drafted up this custom magic item specifically to complement her intended build. Every time she thought she had learned the vast extent to which the caregiver wanted to make Macy’s desires feasible, he did something like this that made her appreciate him all over again.

In other words, giving her this fake weapon for her Mushrooms & Magi character was the greatest thing anyone had ever done for her.  She held up the glowing, formless blade in awe. It felt less than weightless as she swung it in a wide arc over her head, as if it were being pulled to some other font of gravity.  A night breeze blew over her, guided by Moonslicer’s sweep.

Then Princeso threw a bucket of gravel in her face and she woke up.

Macy stood up and dusted herself off, spitting pebbles out of her mouth.  Her tongue would probably taste like dust for a while now. She turned around to see she had tripped on a stray rock while distracted.  Normally she could navigate fairly well while daydreaming — it was like her body went on autopilot — but any unexpected obstacle that appeared would, well, trip her up.  She avoided looking directly into Ontario’s eyes; she hoped they wouldn’t press her on what exactly happened.

She checked her pockets once again, but thankfully nothing had gotten more ruined than it already was.  She was about to congratulate herself on not being a total klutz when she realized she had dropped her backpack in the fall and its contents had scattered all over the road.  Frustrated, she knelt down and began shoving things in haphazardly. If she kept getting distracted like this, she wouldn’t be able to make it to Finn’s girlfriend by sunset, and being in a place called the “Evil Forest” after sunset sounded ill-advised.

As she tried to jam the first-aid kit back into the backpack, she realized to her frustration that it wasn’t fitting.  She attempted to make room by holding everything inside the backpack up with one hand while holding the backpack itself down with her foot, but that still didn’t create enough slack.  With a groan of frustration, she held the medkit out to her new traveling companion.

“Hey Ontario,” she said, “would you mind holding onto this?”

“Oh, sure, doc!” he said eagerly, grabbing it in one hand and slinging it over his shoulder.

“The name’s Macadamia Ju—”  She stopped herself. Did she really want to use that name with a total stranger?  “Macadamia the Nut,” she decided. “She/her.”

“O-oh, I’m he/him.”

“Cool.”  They resumed walking.

As they got deeper into the forest, Macy began hearing more rustling noises in the bushes.  She saw animals larger than Ontario — animals which had no business being that large — dart away fearfully as she approached.  She saw plants recoil as if in terror, their flowers spontaneously wilting in an almost-convincing imitation of death, their leaves curling up and forming spiky tips.  She saw dappled shadows in the distance grow thicker until the canopy above became like a thatched roof. Patches of wildflowers and thorny grasses grew more frequent on the gravel path until they covered it entirely; whenever a spot of unmolested gravel appeared, it revealed a fierce battle between different-colored ants or a foraging worm being harassed by a sadistic pigeon.  Macy watched her step.

Eventually, Macy saw something in the distance that made her pause.  She held out her hand and accidentally clotheslined Ontario, but at least when he got up he didn’t keep moving.  He opened his mouth to ask what was going on, but she shushed him and ducked into the grass, ignoring a mantis that had taken interest in her foot.  She pressed down the grass in front of her to get a better look at what was going on.

A mace-tailed possum and a winged mongoose, both far larger than they had any right to be, were staring each other down a couple score meters away.  The mongoose kept advancing and retreating, flapping its wings not to take off but to give itself a larger, more intimidating silhouette; the possum sidestepped each time, baring its gnarled fangs and hissing.  Around them the grass began to smolder with a sweet, ashy stench.

Suddenly the mongoose lunged forward and the two animals began fighting.  The possum let loose a brutal tail whip to send the mongoose flying, which turned out to be a poor decision given that the mongoose could actually fly.  It began strafing the possum from the sky, dealing quick bites to the shoulders with sickening squelches. In response, the possum belted a great fiery blast from its mouth, igniting some of the less leafy branches above.

Deciding not to wait for her path forward to become blocked by a forest fire, Macy advanced, keeping low, holding her sword out with one hand while keeping Ontario linked to her with the other.  She didn’t want to get close to two fighting animals (monsters?), but she wasn’t sure she had much choice in the matter.

At six meters away, she saw a fireball whiz past startlingly close, its roasting heat nearly blasting her off balance.  Woozy, she yanked Ontario behind a thick-trunked tree, nearly causing him to drop the first-aid kit. Her nut heart was racing.  Clinging to the tree for support, she leaned out to observe the skirmish.

The possum had managed to sink its teeth into one of the mongoose’s wings and was thrashing it about on the ground; the poor mongoose, battered and bloodied, was simply trying to wrest itself free at this point, whatever territorial dispute had started the conflict long forgotten.  A series of clicks issued from the mongoose’s throat, and a wave of fire overtook the possum. The poor creature thrashed about violently, attempting to douse itself before one final tail-whack to its neck brought its life to a merciful end. Macy felt a retching sensation slowly rise up her throat and fought back the urge to vomit.

After glancing around to ensure nobody else would challenge its authority, the possum clamped its jaws around the torso of the still-smoldering mongoose.  It began pulling it back into the thicket whence it had emerged, leaving a trail of blood and ash behind. The wing that had been bitten before caught on a rock; the possum kept tugging, and the wing tip was torn off.

Then an enormous, blue-furred, two-headed puma leapt out of the canopy and pounced on the possum, killing it instantly with a bone-crushing squelch.

As soon as it landed, all the fires in the area went out.  Dew began condensing around it, and as it ambled down the path — in her direction, Macy noted glumly — jagged ice crystals sprang up in its pawprints.  It paid little heed to the corpses behind it, merely wiping its tail over them to coat them in a layer of frost. Either it was confident that nothing would try to mess with it by disturbing its kill, or its vendetta was territorial as well.

Before it reached the tree Macy was using for cover, it stopped and sat, wrapping its tail around its torso.  Its mighty snout sniffed the air, its breath coming out in tiny clouds of wintry mist.  _ It’s a cool cat, _ Macy suddenly remembered; they appeared on several denominations of Ice Kingdom currency, as detailed in  _ A Collector’s Guide to Coinage, Vol. 47. _   Indeed, its proximity seemed to suck the warmth from the air.  An unnatural chill ran through Macy’s core. She ducked fully behind the tree once again.  Now she wanted to vomit  _ and _ shiver.

Then she heard once more its approaching steps, accompanied by a low growl, and realized she could no longer hide.  It had sniffed her out, and there was nothing she could do about it. It was going to reach her in about two seconds, and then it was going to crush her, and her body was going to shatter into a million pieces small enough to be picked up by the breeze and deposited in the ocean where she would be found by a sailor… who would put her back together… and give her a sword…?

_ That panic-induced hallucination certainly went in an odd direction at the end, _ Macy thought.  She did a knee-bent head-tilt, puzzling over what could possibly have prompted that.  Maybe it was something she ate. If that was the case, she needed to eat it more often.  Her stomach protested this thought by turning inside-out again. That was her third hallucination, after all, so she was going to lose something soon.

Then she felt a puff of freezing, oddly moist air on her shoulder.   _ Oh right, the cool cat. _   She dutifully resumed her panicking.  She felt a shake in her right hand and realized Ontario was panicking too.  She swallowed her fear (as well as her nausea) and stepped out, blade raised, to face the puma.

The beast stood a good meter taller than her; one of is massive heads, nearly the size of her entire body, sniffed her curiously while the other stood a vigilant guard.  Its breath smelled oddly minty. The sniffing head issued a low, guttural growl. Macy averted her eyes; the Root Sword slipped from her grasp, her fingertips growing numb.

The head facing her sneezed in her face, the other said, “What a chump,” and the cat turned back to the bodies on the ground.

Once the puma had collected them — one in each mouth — and leapt back up into the trees, Macy allowed herself to breathe again.   _ That was way too close. _   One part of her mind was berating herself for freezing up and dropping her sword.  Another knew that if she had done anything other than what she did, she likely would have come out of that encounter worse than scared.  A third was disappointed that the reaction she  _ would _ have had was one that, in retrospect, would have been disastrous.  A fourth was laughing at that “freezing up” joke; the first three parts found this to be a situationally inappropriate response.  In summation, Macy was feeling so many things that she didn’t feel much of anything.

“Yo, so, okay,” said Ontario, sounding a lot less nerve-wracked than Macy.  “It’s not just me, right? That was really weird, right?”

Hand still trembling, Macy picked up her sword.  The hilt seemed like it had withered slightly. “Y-yeah, it was.”  She gave the blade a test swing, but it felt unchanged. “Let’s not test fortune’s mood, though; we should get moving before another incident occurs.  Fortune hates a slow deal, after all.”

“I thought it was, ‘Fortune hates a crowded park.’”

Macy looked askance at him — a difficult maneuver for her, but one which she had practiced meticulously — and rolled her eyes.  “As far as I care, Ontario, it’s ‘Fortune hates dallying by the rosebushes.’ Let’s go.” Something about this dog was beginning to rub Macy the wrong way.  Plus, she kept getting the feeling that she was forgetting something.

* * *

They walked a good distance more through the thickening forest.  By now the grass was up to their knees; Macy was carving a path through the thick swathes with the Root Sword.  The pungent smell of the cut grasses encouraged Macy to keep moving, but apparently it enticed Ontario, for he kept trying to roll around in it.  She had to drag him along like some manner of leashed animal to keep moving at anything close to a reasonable pace.

Also attracted to the smell of grasses were a variety of increasingly large, increasingly monstrous bugs.  Macy had to fend them with her sword, swinging wildly in a bizarre act of intimidation. For the most part, the bugs quickly realized that the cream-colored blade was not something to be trifled with, and after a few warning swipes at the air she would scare most of them off.  One beetle, sporting a stylish goatee and with a bass guitar strapped to its back, got a bit too close for comfort; Macy twanged the instrument with the crossguard of the Root Sword, and in retaliation it bowled her over and then flew into the trees to re-tune it, but after that it left the travelers alone while its guitar gently wept.

Soon Macy noticed that the ground was growing damper, the bugs more plentiful, and the slope of the path more consistently downward.  She knew what this meant, and as she suspected it wasn’t long until the stream she had fallen into hours before crossed paths with the trail she walked.  The area by the river was brighter thanks to the slight gap in the treeline it enforced. A roughshod log bridge lay across the river, affixed at either end by hempen rope staked firmly into the ground.  Macy watched as a large salmon with enormous muscular biceps leapt out of the water and over the bridge, flexing and giving her a wink before it splashed back into the water. She gagged, feeling suddenly sick.

In an attempt to get her mind off that mental image as soon as possible, she walked up to the log and tapped it with her foot.  It was unsurprisingly damp but surprisingly firm. She supposed it wouldn’t have been used as a bridge if it weren’t capable of  _ thousands of ants were flowing out from unDER THE LOG OH MY GLOB— _

She nearly fell over, just barely catching herself with her elbows.  She had to dig her heels in to stop herself from rolling down the slope and into the creek for the second time that day.

“Hoo boy,  _ that’s _ pretty gross,” said Ontario from near enough to Macy’s ear slit that she was fairly certain he could easily have caught her.  “Are you sure this is the way to go, doc?”

“You’re free to stop following me whenever you want, you know.”  Macy stood up, wobbling a bit, and wiped dirt and ants off her hoodie.  “Also stop calling me doc, it’s weird.”

“You got it, Nut.”

“I changed my mind.”  Macy took a hearty swig from her water bottle, then handed it off to her tagalong.  Trepidatiously, she advanced once more, kneeling by the stakes to peer into the log.  It seemed empty now; hopefully she had spooked all of the resident ants. Very slowly, she reached out a foot and ever so slightly poked the log.  She held her breath, blocking out the acrid smell of the log. Nothing happened. “Feel free to call me anything except ‘Nut’.”

Holding her arms out for balance, Macy began the precarious trek across the stream.  Above the brook a cool breeze blew a bit stronger than in the thick of the trees, picking up the smells from the river and blasting Macy with them.  She had never before wished that she had a nose she could scrunch — not because the smell was bad, necessarily, but because it was distracting. She made the mistake of glancing upstream to see the salmon from before sticking its head out of the water and kissing its biceps repeatedly. Its sickening aura intensified.

Once she was near enough to the end of the log, she jumped onto the soft ground on the other side and spun around.  Ontario was making his way across the log with ease. The bandage on his arm caused him to exhibit notably less ease in the act of hoisting the medkit over his head with the water bottle balanced atop its center.  Something about the dark shadow it cast over his face, contrasted with the less-obscured sunlight around him, made him seem vaguely sinister.

Perhaps it was the salmon off to the side which was now attempting some sort of rhythmic dance.  Macy closed her eyes and turned away from that, nauseous. She felt like she was going to throw up.

* * *

The forest after the river was significantly more cramped.  In addition to the increasingly dense weeds, Macy now had to continually cut down thick curtains of vines which draped from the canopy above.  Occasionally a patch of grass would appear trampled or otherwise disturbed, although she never saw whatever creature might have disturbed it. On more than one occasion she and Ontario dove into a thicket at the sound of a distant growl or approaching pasteps, yet they never caught a glimpse of their source.  Even the insects grew more sparse as the plants grew thicker — no mere correlation, as Macy discovered when she observed a butterfly alight upon a purple tulip, which promptly swallowed the bug whole. Macy made a point to steer clear of anything bright after that.

When hints of muted gold began tingeing the muted sunlight, the combination of general weariness and uncomfortable humidity forced Macy to take a seat on a small boulder at the edge of the trail.  Judging by the time it probably was and how fast she felt like she had been walking, she may be getting close to Finn’s girlfriend’s place, possibly, if she was right. She took out her water bottle, which felt a lot lighter than when she had packed it.  Concerned, she unscrewed the lid and peered inside. Empty.  _ Math this day. _

She reached into her backpack and pulled out one smashed granola bar.  Sighing, she unwrapped it — shoving the empty wrapper back in the pack — and split it in half, giving one half to Ontario.  “Here. Calories.”

“Oh boy, I love calories!”  In a single chomp, he nommed his entire half of the granola bar without taking it from Macy’s hand.

Macy leaned back and sighed, a weary grin spreading over her face.  “Dogs.” She ate her own granola slowly and deliberately, letting the nutty, vaguely sweet flavor sink in with each measured bite.

As she shoved the last of the granola bar into her mouth, she leaned forward again, closing her eyes and focusing on the taste.  Memories came unbidden to her mind: finding Ontario in the bush, the fight between the possum and the mongoose, that  _ flipping _ salmon from the log bridge.  A wave of nausea spread through her once more.  She held the last chewed slurry of granola in her mouth, unable to swallow.  That though further compounded her queasiness, and she retched.

_ Don’t think about that, Macy.  Think about your happy place. _   She willed herself to think about golf.  She thought about hanging out with Finn, about meeting Cragg, about making fun of Tiffany.  She thought about her room in the Duchy of Nuts, with that floral silhouette in green. She thought about feeding the birds with her dad, about idle conversations with Pen, about playing M&M with Masse and Princeso and Robin.  Mostly she thought about Robin. As she pictured zhir ruby eyes, zhir confident gait, zhir button-braided tail, Macy felt herself recenter. Her nausea didn’t go away, but it subsided somewhat.

“It’s getting kinda late,” observed Ontario.  As he spoke he kept his eye locked on Macy’s hand, perhaps working up the courage to ask for her crumbs.  “I was hoping not to get caught in the Evil Forest after dark.”

“Yeah,” croaked Macy, slowly standing up, ignoring the sudden stiffness in her joints.  “We should probably  _ (oof) _ build some sort of  _ (oof!) _ shelter soon.”

“I don’t know if I’ll last long in the cold, doc.”  He rubbed his bandaged arm, still staring at Macy’s hand.  “Especially in my condition. I’m not as hale and hearty as you.  I just wish I had some way to instantly get out of the forest with no complications.”

That oddly specific phrase gave Macy an idea.  “Hold on, I might just have something for you.  Here you go.” She took the ring of recall off her finger and handed it to the shibe. “This should warp you directly to the allegedly-Great Tree.”

“Haha, that’s great!  Thanks doc.” He tapped the ring twice with his index finger, and then in a flash of azure light he vanished.

As soon as her tagalong was gone, Macy collapsed onto the ground.  She knew it was irrational, but she didn’t want to show how little composure she truly had in front of someone she had just met.  In truth, she had barely the strength to stand. Perhaps the morning’s golf excursion had tired her more than she realized, or perhaps she simply had no stamina in the first place.  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. She wasn’t sure of anything these days. The one thing she knew was that she wanted to be an adventurer, and half the time she wasn’t even sure of  _ that. _   If adventures were usually like this, she might start having second thoughts.  Again.

Then the nausea returned, and this time Macy realized — too late — that it wasn’t purely emotional.  She puked out a pile of granola and half-digested sandwich onto the forest floor before retching at the smell and puking again.  The sensation of the food leaving her body in the wrong direction, the bizarre perversion of the digestive process, was the worst part of it.  At least, that’s what she thought until she felt it coming out the other end.

* * *

Entirely too much of that later, Macy dragged herself back to the boulder where she had unceremoniously dumped all of her supplies.  Groggily, fighting back several dry heaves, she rifled through her backpack looking for the first-aid kit, hoping it would contain something of use.  When she remembered that it wasn’t in her backpack, she began frantically pacing around, pawing up the grass to find where it might have been dropped.

Realization finally dawned on her just when the sensation of pressing a hand into a rotting thicket of weeds triggered a tiny bit of puke she didn’t know she still had in her.  “Ontario!” she shouted weakly. The dog must have taken the medkit with him when he teleported away. He’d gotten Macy to give him the ring, and then he’d stranded her. He must have known what the ring was the whole time.  Had he even arranged for her to spill her backpack so he could be in charge of the medkit? “You  _ gator!” _

A second realization coward’s-dawned a moment later.  That was what she had forgotten — stories about a dog whom everyone mistook for a squirrel, a perennial huckster who typically latched himself onto a bigger, more conventionally dangerous villain, the chessmaster behind the strings who played peoples’ emotions like Jake played the viola.

“Ontario is Toronto,” she moaned, collapsing onto the ground once more.  “I really need to study more history.” After being teased by her classmates for idolizing Finn back when she was at the orphanage, the fact that she got (as a twenty-first century viewer might put it) dunked on for not obsessing over his exploits  _ enough _ was sobering.  Laughing and moaning in equal measure, Macy lay there on the forest floor as the gentle sounds of a thunderstorm lulled her into another memory.

* * *

The icosahedral die tumbled across the cheap toffee-metal alloy of the folding table with a small cacophony before finally coming to a rest with that most horrid figure pointing ceilingward.  A collective gasp echoed throughout the crowded orphanage dining room; even Chipper the chip, balancing on a pair of stilts as he hung up a portrait of Princess Bubblegum one of the orphans had drawn, turned to look.

A beat.

“…natural one,” sighed Macy.  “That’s obviously not gonna hit the dragon.”

Princeso seemed somber too.  “No, it is not. Lemme just roll something real quick…”  There was a quick clatter of dice behind the folded cardboard he used as his head honcho screen, presumably the pair of ten-siders that were rolled to determine random effects.  “You, ah, er, hm. You drop your weapon.”

“Aw, math.”  Macy scribbled something on her character sheet.  “That means my defense number is reduced. I’m gonna get hit by  _ everything. _ ”

“Speaking of which, at the end of your turn, the dragon uses one of its bodacious actions to do a headfin attack against you, which…”  He rolled another die behind his screen, probably another icosahedral die. “That plus that… Does a 17 hit you?”

“It does  _ now.” _

After one more tense clattering of secret dice, Princeso announced the result in a low, almost melancholic tone of voice.  “That’s, um, holy cow. 31 points of poking damage.”

“Right, so I’m at…”  Macy tugged on Masse’s shoulder, startling him out of his engrossed reverie.  “Hey Seyv. What’s twenty-seven minus thirty-one?”

He started counting on his fingers.  “That’d be, let’s see, carry the one, that’d be sixteen.”  A beat. “Wait, no, negative four.”

Macy erased her health number on her character sheet and was about to write the new number down when she suddenly paused.  “Wait a minute, negative four is a  _ negative _ number.”  She dropped the pencil and threw her hands in the air, leaning back in her creaky folding chair.  “I’m unconscious.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got you,” came Robin’s voice from two places at once.  Zhir eyes glowed, and a beam of ruby light shone out of them. The number on Macy’s character sheet began increasing before her eyes, and she felt herself grow heartier.

Emboldened, she drew the wicked longsword in her one good arm, its silvery single-edged blade flickering with moonlight.  She stared down the massive cookie dragon before her, raising her blade as it hummed with divine power. As she swung, a shockwave of radiant energy issued forth, slicing the dragon in half and releasing the billions upon billions of ants which had been trapped inside.

Then something wet hit Macy on the forehead and she found herself startled back to consciousness, laying against the boulder as a worried Robin examined her like a physician examining a friend they found sick in the middle of an evil forest.

“…hey, Robin,” she groaned.  She tried to prop herself up, but her stomach protested, so she leaned back against the rock.  Her back protested at the thud, but her back would have to play with the hand fortune had dealt it.   _ I’ve got a lot of metaphors from that fortune poem stuck in my head, _ she observed.   _ What was it called?  “The Ode of the Golden Byway”?  Or was it the Golden Highway? _   “By or high?” she asked aloud.

“I have no idea what that means.  Also, thank Glob you’re awake!” Robin gave Macy a hug so tight she could almost feel it through her legendarily thick shell.  Then zhe grasped her by the shoulders, stared at her with zhir ruby eyes, and started talking  _ fast. _   “Also also, what were you  _ thinking? _   You’ve showed about zero wilderness survival skill since you got out here.  You didn’t even think to turn back when you got sick! You’re really lucky I caught a glimpse of your surroundings when you had the shattering daymare or I never would have caught up to you.”

Macy blinked slowly.  “When I got sick… shatter—”

“And  _ another _ thing!  Getting that close to an injured animal, especially one who’s a known convict in basically every kingdom on Ooo, is just asking for trouble.  You want rabies? You want Lemyn disease? Because that’s how rabies gets Lemyn disease. Also cursed gangrene. At least tell me you had the presence of mind to not try to use the log bridge.”

Macy sat still for about ten seconds while her mind caught up with reality.  “Oh, um, about that — it’s not like anything bad happened!” A beat. “Immediately.”

Robin facepawed.  “Well, if you made it to the other side okay, then that’s fine, as long as you didn’t fall  _ in _ the water.”

Macy turned to examine a sproutling weed on the side of the path.

“Oh my glob you did.”

“Not back there!” protested Macy.  She turned back to look at Robin, embarrassment rising like one more thing to regurgitate now that she was out of food.  “Just at the beginning of the trip.”

“That’s even—”  Robin paused, closed her eyes, and did a quick breathing exercise; zhir colored stripes temporarily became a gradient.  When zhir eyes opened again, zhir pattern seemed crisper than ever. “Tell me everything.”

Robin didn’t say anything for the duration of Macy’s story.  After it was over, zhe simply held up zhir paw as if telling Macy to wait before darting into the thick of the woods.  For about thirty seconds, Macy was once again alone with her thoughts. However, since she lacked the energy to think, those thirty seconds were solely spent wondering how long Robin had been gone without actually speculating.

“Alright, I’m back,” said Robin, back.  Zhe grabbed a clump of weeds and wrung them out into Macy’s water bottle, then shoved some herbs into it before smashing them with zhir paw and handing the bottle to Macy.  “Drink.”

Macy did so.  The taste was so tongue-punchingly bitter that she wanted to spit it out immediately, but she forced herself to swallow.  “Wazzissfer?”

“Aggravated groundwater disease and Derek’s plasmitis.  Don’t you remember anything from the many, many times Princeso had the Marshmallow Rangers over to talk about wilderness safety?”

Macy flashed back to her earlier flashback.  “Technically yes.”

“Then you should remember that the breath of a cool cat contains a chemical they use to induce lethargy in their prey, and you need to counteract that  _ immediately _ or you’ll get Derek’s plasmitis.”  Zhe pushed Macy upright and then transformed into a walking cane.  “Oh, uh, gather up your supplies; I found a dead tree we can use as shelter for the night.  I’ll thatch the roof and glamour the entrances so we don’t get disturbed, and you should be a bit less out of sorts in the morning.”

As Macy found her legs, she also found an extraordinary desire to plop down into the muddy grass and plant herself.  Perhaps that could be her next great adventure. But no, she didn’t want to disappoint her walking cane, and she had already committed to finding this mysterious girlfriend; she needed to follow through.  In the fading light of the oncoming sunset, she needed to use Robin to locate most of her dropped supplies. The rainicorn-dog understandably did not appreciate finding the Root Sword the hard way, but Macy didn’t know what zhe was complaining about; zhir paw was barely bleeding.

Once all that was gathered and Macy started heading off into the woods per Robin’s holographic directions, she gathered the presence of mind to ask the questions that had been forming at the back of her mind since her friend had first appeared out of nowhere.  “So, what are you doing out here anyway? And how do you know all this stuff?”

“Oh, I didn’t want to miss the chance to talk to Finn’s girlfriend.  Besides, nature’s always been my thing, remember? You have your heroism, I have my naturalism.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s fair.”  She sloppily cut down a tangle of vines, briefly getting the Root Sword stuck before pulling it out.  “Wait, I thought you said you hadn’t met Finn’s girlfriend.”

“I haven’t met her, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know who she is.  You should know, too, since you’ve read all the stories.”

“Actually, the stories are pretty inconsistent about that.  I think maybe that’s a piece of his private life he doesn’t want made public.”

Robin created an illusory stick-figure arm so zhe could shrug without breaking pace.  “Or maybe he just didn’t view that as important enough to tell anyone.”

When Macy woke up the next morning, she would be infuriated at her past self for not having the presence of mind to ask any obvious follow-up questions.

* * *

Robin lay another large scavenged branch against the side of the massive, hollowed tree trunk.  Zhe was impressed by how much the simple, makeshift walls muffled the unconscionably loud snores coming from zhir friend, who had fallen asleep as soon as zhe had set her down.  It was a wonder every monster in the woods hadn’t rushed over here as soon as the sun had set.

Zhe grabbed some mud and slinked up the conical structure zhe had created, being careful not to rest any weight on it.  Zhe reached inside to pull out some grass zhe had been drying and began using them to cover up some of the gaps between branches.  In addition to keeping the sound in, zhe wanted to keep the cold and rain out, especially given Macadamia’s frail condition. Zhe wouldn’t be able to thatch it like zhe had promised, since it smelled like the storm was going to worsen soon, but zhe would at least ensure Macy stayed relatively dry through the night.

Zhe swung zhirself up into a tree just as zhe heard scampering on the forest floor below.  Thinking quickly, zhe cast a minor illusion over the makeshift hut, causing it to appear as an uninteresting pile of detritus.  Hopefully the incomplete upper layers were enough to mask Macy’s smell. Zhir own smell was similar to that of a number of creatures which lived in the forest, so zhe simply had to hope that zhe wasn’t inherently interesting.  ‘Hoping for the best’ wasn’t usually zhir survival strategy, but zhe didn’t usually have to run into the woods to save zhir friend from two diseases at once and also possibly monsters.

Zhe hid in the tree as zhe watched a two-headed cool cat walk by below.  It held two well-preserved corpses in its mouths, and while Robin’s eyesight was awful, zhe was willing to bet they were the same animals Macy had described fighting earlier.  It plodded up to the shelter and began sniffing around the woven leaf curtains Robin had laid over the entrance. It must have recognized zhir friend’s smell from inside. Robin waited with bated breath to see what its machinations were.  One head seemed to pull it toward the door, but the other nodded in a different direction and the cat began rooting around and examining some of the weeds on the ground.

Robin let out the tiniest sight of relief.  Zhe couldn’t believe that Macy had been stupid enough to try to hide from a cool cat by ducking behind a tree.  Had she simply forgotten that most animals have decent senses of smell, even after being friends with zhir for most of her life?   _ No, she’d just acted without thinking. _   Masse Yvoire used to have that effect on her, and Masse was always weighting on Macy’s mind nowadays.  Robin, for zhir part, tended to avoid acting without thinking by avoiding acting altogether. For some reason Princeso had objected to zhir attempts to impart upon Macy and Masse the virtues of laziness.

A snapping sound brought Robin to sudden focus.  The cool cat noticed it too; its heads jerked up and looking attentively from side to side, its hair standing on end.  Then like a blue thunderbolt it dashed deeper into the forest. Whatever it had been looking for clearly wasn’t worth sticking around to discover the source of that noise.  Robin shared the opinion, but zhe couldn’t abandon Macy, so zhe simply waited.

After about fifteen minutes, zhe was reasonably convinced that if the source were a creature it had elected not to pursue.  Zhe collected some of the larger leaves from the tree, leaned down toward the shelter, and began creating a proper roof that could actually keep zhir friend dry.  Zhe could never say this, but zhe had been insulted when Macy had turned down zhir offer to follow her into the woods to begin with. This kind of skill was something that Robin had much more experience with than Macy did.  For all her bravado, Macy wasn’t really an adventurer, and Robin knew this. Robin, on the other paw,  _ was _ an outdoorsdog, with all that entailed.  To not be considered for an expedition like this was a grave insult.

As zhe continued to weave the insulating layers in the worsening storm, a thought as heavy as precipitation weighed zhir down.  Zhe was definitely better at introspection than Macy, but zhe was no means perfect. Perhaps zhir own claim to outdoorsdogship was as tenuous as Macy’s claim to heroism had been until yesterday.  That would explain why Macy had rejected Robin’s offer in that way — not because she didn’t  _ understand _ the rainicorn-dog’s feelings, but because she wanted to  _ spare _ them by not telling zhir that the real reason she didn’t want zhir to accompany her was zhir incompetence.  With that fresh new insecurity added onto the pile, Robin finished up the roof and slinked through the curtain to steal a few hours of restless sleep.

* * *

Macy awoke in darkness to the sound of shuffling outside.  She was alone in a hollowed log, an impenetrable veil of darkness cloaking her.  The sat up quickly and immediately regretted it as her stomach threatened to leap out of her throat yet again.  “Owie,” she moaned, holding her head in one hand and her nut butt in the other. She patted down her hoodie, which was covered in dirt and brush.  The hoodie pocket was empty, and panic welled up in her nut heart.

Macy began frantically pawing around the edge of the edifice looking for a door.  In her haste she shoved her arms right through a curtain of woven grasses and tumbled face-first onto the damp, fragrant forest floor.  Spitting out some dirt along with a disgruntled worm, she rolled around and looked up at the structure she had been taken to. It was some sort of primitive conical hut covered in mud and leaves, presumably constructed by one of the vile denizens of the Evil Forest.  It would no doubt be back to finish her off soon. The thought made her sicker to her stomach than she already was.

Wait, no, that didn’t make sense.  As the bright light coming from above, even filtered through the thick canopy, began to jog Macy’s mind, her hazy memory of the previous day’s misadventures calcified.  A wild beast hadn’t captured her; Robin had rescued her and presumably built this shelter during the night. In retrospect, the idea that some forest creature had brought her into its den and then simply left her alone was nonsensical, but it was too early in the morning for her to be rational.  Either that, or she had slept in too late.

Which begged the question:  Where was Robin right now?

Macy was too sick to think of any non-awful possibilities.  Perhaps she had been right about the wild beast after all. Perhaps one had come and taken Robin instead.  Perhaps the rainicorn-dog had went off to gather more herbs and gotten lost or ambushed. Perhaps zhe had simply abandoned Macy in the middle of the forest, embarrassed by her tragic failure as a hero.  Perhaps Robin had never even existed in the first place.

The dappled light around Macy seemed to mock her.  She collapsed onto the ground and dragged herself back into the hut.  Once she was inside, she began to hyperventilate. Her stomach begged for food and threatened to turn itself inside-out again at the same time.  She fumbled around on the ground until she found a flashlight she didn’t remember bringing and turned it on. She shone it around the ceiling of the abode, simple except for some sort of slab near the top.  This was the last thing her best friend had made before abandoning her and/or dying and/or never having existed in the first place. She took it in.

Next she shone the light around the floor.  All of Macy’s belongings she had taken with her were arranged neatly in the corner, set across a small blanket Robin must have brought with zhir.  She also saw several items that Robin must have brought with zhir; in addition to the aforementioned, there were several loose-bound books, a collection of jars and bags (some empty, some full of various substances), a prismgram crystal, a blue gemstone hatchet, and a tinderbox.  How Robin had carried all of these items, Macy had no idea.

She peered closer at one of the bottles, which was full of rice.  Shining the light down onto the surface, she could see that her phone was sitting inside.  She should probably take it out and then do something to take care of the water that had gotten into it.  She reached into the jar and fished around for the phone. As she grabbed it, the smell of the damp rice reminded her of a trick she had once seen in an old sitcom for getting water out of phones.  What you had to do was put it in a jar of — oh. She took her hand out of the jar and set the phone down. She was glad nobody would ever know about that embarrassing bit of inner monologue.

She considered looking through Robin’s supplies to find something to eat, but despite her hunger she had no appetite.  Instead she just lay down in the middle of the shelter, starting up at the ceiling shelf. She didn’t turn off the flashlight, merely planting it face-first into the ground.  There in the darkness she began to cry.

Images flashed through her mind once more of all the times she had told herself that she was going to be a hero — all the times she had let herself believe that lie.  She and Masse sneaking out without Princeso’s knowledge, fantasizing about Finn taking her on as an apprentice, trying to solve a pudding heist on her first day in the Duchy of Nuts:  All of it seemed so foolish now. Sure, she may have saved a day in the Crystal Dimension, but that was just one of fortune’s inscrutable gambits. Also, she  _ really _ couldn’t get that poem out of her head; she never had, ever since Princeso had gotten the poem’s author to come to the orphanage and read it.

“Man, that’s not even  _ remotely _ what the poet guy looked like.”  Robin’s voice, coming from the real world, jolted Macy out of her reverie.  She got up, picking up the flashlight and shining it unnecessarily in Robin’s face.  “Glob, Macy!” zhe shouted, nearly dropping the bundle of leaves in zhir arms as zhe recoiled.

“Sorry,” said Macy sheepishly as she turned off the flashlight properly.  “Also don’t pry into my mind like that. And ‘the poet guy’?”

“I may not remember any details about him, but I know you got it wrong probably.”  Zhe strode across the room and began sorting the herbs into various jars, lighting up zhir horn to illuminate the hut.  “Plus, you’ve gone through a traumatic experience and you slept in way later than usual, so I gotta check up on your mental health.”

_ That’s not quite what “checking up on someone’s mental health” means, but I  _ think _ you know that so I won’t say anything. _   “I probably slept in because there’s no window in this place.”

“That and you’re super sick.  Take this,” zhe said, handing Macy some concoction.

Macy swallowed the cold leaf juice.  She had to coax it down her throat with sweet nothings.  “I’m sorry,” she gagged.

“Good.”

Reflexively Macy spat the concoction back into the bottle.  “Excuse me?”

“You donked up, Macy.”  Robin curled up into a pyramid and stared down at Macy.  “You’re a talented kid, but you’re still a kid. I wanted you to talk to my poppop because I wanted to show you the difference between being talented and actually having the skills you need to be an adventurer, and I figured you’d learned that lesson when you did the whole test of strength dealio.  When you decided that you had enough natural knowledge to walk a meager five miles through a forest, I was dumb enough to believe that you were capable of making that assessment about yourself. I should have stopped you. I should have…” Zhe facepawed.  “But you shouldn’t have gone in the first place!”

“Robin!”  Even though Macy had been saying these same things to herself not five minutes ago, hearing them stated like this made her disagree out of spite.  “Are you saying that I’m incompetent? That I’m worthless?”

“No, I’m not saying that at all!  I’m saying you’re super talented, but you just need to  _ hone _ those talents.”

“That’s what I’m coming out here to do!”

“Well, then you’re doing it out of order, because coming out here requires a talent that you haven’t developed yet.  How many juvenile mistakes did you make along the way here that led you to this current circumstance?”

Macy deflated.  “More than I’d like to think about,” she admitted.

“Exactly.  Now, why is that?”

“Because I’m stupid.”

“No!”  The word came out angrier than zhe intended.  “No,” zhe repeated softly. “You’re brilliant, Macadamia.  You’re super talented, and a quick learner, and more responsible than I’ll ever be.  You just need to know your limits.”

Macy scoffed.  “Right now I feel like my limits are the walls of this shelter.”

“Then you need to build up some  _ true _ self-confidence and figure out what your limits really are.”  Zhe shrunk down to zhir indoor size and reached out zhir paw to pull Macy up.  “Allow me to show you them.”

Macy stared at the outstretched paw for a moment.  This represented a second chance she wasn’t willing to give herself.  Was she really deserving of that? Was it even a good idea to take it?  Robin seemed to think so, and right now Macy trusted Robin more than she trusted herself.

Still, there was another issue that needed to be cleared up before the two could step into the light.  She knocked Robin’s paw away feebly but firmly. “Okay, but first we need to talk about the other thing.”

“What other thing?”

“The real reason you’re so upset with me.”  Macy felt a dry heave coming on, but she talked over it, determined to get this thought out before her green-knighting body could interrupt her.  “You don’t like that I left you behind because you’re too dependent on me.”

“What?  That’s preposterous!”  Robin made a dismissive hand gesture as Macy heaved.  “Besides, didn’t we just talk two days ago about how you’re not super good at telling that sort of stuff?”

“No, we talked about how I’m bad at introspectation or whatever it’s called.  That doesn’t mean I can’t tell things about  _ other _ people, and it’s pretty obvious that you’ve got a problem when it comes to me.”

“No, I don’t,” lied Robin.

“Sure you do.  You say that naturalism is your thing, but it kind of way isn’t.  It’s a thing you do, sure, but it’s a  _ very _ minor aspect of your life when compared to how much time you dedicate to me.”

“That’s banyaners, Macy.  You’re being banyaners.”

“I’m not being banyaners, I’m being completely and utterly nyaners.  I don’t know whether it’s because you’ve systematically shut out almost every non-Lady Rainicorn member of your family or just because I’m some ridiculous passion project, but you are clearly and certifiably obsessed with me.  You followed me from the Candy Kingdom to the Sienna Ridge for literally no reason that has to do with yourself, and given the results of this expedition, even I have to admit that you encourage my worst impulses, just like Seyv used to do.”

“Seyv?”

“Seyv, Masse, whatever you want to call him.  The crux is I needed to give you some space, because — because you’re right.”  Macy stood up, standing eye level with Robin and staring at zhir, her eyes still shining wet with tears.  “I’m a kid, Robin. A scared, confused, overly ambitious kid. And I can’t keep being the truss you build your life around.”

Robin melted.

Macy immediately knelt down and tried to mold Robin back into a vague rainicorn-dog shape.  When zhe noticed her worry, zhe began morphing back into zhir previous form. “Are you okay?”  Macy asked, a note of desperation overtaking the general sickliness of her voice. “Did I dunk you so hard your body lost its integrity?”

“Nah, that’s probably not a thing that can happen.”  Robin braced zhirself on Macy’s arm to pull zhirself back up, then started leaning on her and leading her out of the hut.  “I was just relieved that your reason for leaving me behind wasn’t because you thought I was incompetent or something.”

“What, you don’t have any reaction to the whole dependency thing?”

“I think you’ve got that pretty spot-on.  Mostly I’m just impressed with your natural talent ‘n intelligence.  Kinda hoping it’ll rub off on me.”

Macy paused before the curtain and elbowed Robin.  “No, I mean, don’t you think you should change anything?  Try to not be so reliant on me?”

“Only if you promise to not be so reliant on me.”

“I meant you should talk to some of your other family members.  Share the load.”

“I guess I can do that for you.”  Zhe pushed the door open; light flooded in as the two friends stepped out to meet it.

Macy was going to say something about Robin needing to do it for zhirself as well when the symbolic catharsis of them leaving their constructed shelter and becoming illuminated was literally overshadowed by a towering figure, one whose growl stirred in the nut feverish memories from when her fever had started to worsen.  Slowly, as if by delaying its reveal she could postpone its reality, she cast her eyes upwards to examine the great beast which stood before them.

It was bipedal, its flat steel feet supporting two spindly metal stilts of legs whose entire lengths had a pattern of equal-sized holes dotting the middle.  The metal may once have been iron, but over the centuries it had rusted over and filled in with some inorganic sinew as it took on a life of its own. Its knees bowed out, warped from stress to actually look like knees; that was somehow more disturbing than the alternative would have been.  Toward the top, the sinews spread out, forming a haunch for the utterly baffling creature that loomed above them.

Ontario — Toronto, rather — had spoken true:  It was a sign. Specifically, it was massive, metallic billboard, whose original text had been worn away by time, except a blue shield with the number 384, no doubt representing some pre-Mushroom-War military regiment.  A jagged, rusty hole stretching across the bottom half of the sign formed a roaring mouth, from which flecks of metal like saliva sprayed out onto Macy’s poor unfortunate eyes. Two metal spokes like its legs stuck out from either side, forming arms which ended in hands made of flexing steel wool.

_ I must not be afraid, _ Macy told herself as it bent down and reached toward them with its hands.   _ I must have courage.  I will not stand paralyzed like I did when faced with the cool cat. _   Armed with this resolve, Macy vomited on its hand as it picked her up.  There was a sizzle as her stomach acids attempted to eat away at the metal appendage, and it howled in pain, but it did not let go.

Macy watched as Robin stretched zhirself back into the tent.   _ At least I’m not getting us  _ both _ killed, _ she thought as the gritty grip of the steel wool on her carapace tightened.  It reminded her of a time she had buffed her shell way too hard. Masse had called her “disco” for a week after that.  Princeso, misreading the situation, had attempted to intercede on Macy’s behalf by telling her that if she wanted to be a disco ball that was okay.  The next Yulemas, he had even gotten Macy a disco ball as a present, probably at Masse’s instruction. Macy liked to think that she had gotten him back good by having Princeso get him a sieve.  She liked to think that.

“Heads up!” came a voice from behind Macy.  With a great scraping, she turned herself around even as the sign hoisted her toward its impossible maw.  Zhe saw Robin, curled around the roof, clutching the Root Sword. “Hyah!” zhe shouted as zhe tossed it through the air toward her.

Somehow Macy caught it.  She used the momentum left over from the throw to spin herself around, swinging the blade further and chopping off the monster’s fingers in one continuous motion.  As she fell, she stabbed the sword into the side of the shelter, slowing herself down just enough that the impact of landing on her nut rear was shocking rather than debilitating.

“Whoa-oah!” called Robin as zhe collapsed along with the shelter, its already metastable structural integrity compromised by Macy’s improvised fire pole routine.  Macy tried to stand, holding her sword in a defensive posture and preparing to charge toward the giant, but her own foot was caught under a fallen log.

As she strained to shift the wood off of her leg, the steel-wool hand of the beast slammed down on top of it, crushing her leg with a searing pain.  She screamed and retched simultaneously, losing all concentration and dropping her sword. A stiltlike leg kicked the weapon away, sending it flying until it landed blade-first in a nearby tree.

Macy had no time to process this before the hand closed around her again.  This time she had no strength to struggle; between her general strength, the shooting pain in her leg, and the discouraging moans of Robin below her, she was out of hope.  She saw the beast’s maw open before her and took this as a sign that this was the end of the road for her.

Her eyes drifted once more to the faded 384.  In her last moments she idly wondered what the number might be counting.  Then a snapping sound came from the metal heels below, and both Macy and the monster looked down.

A figure in a brown cloak, holding a tiny blade, had just scored a line across both of its legs above the feet; one had nearly disconnected at the juncture, and Macy watched as they kicked the other one out of alignment as well.  As it started tipping, the sign spread out its arms and waved them in a circle to stabilize itself.

This proved to be a mistake.  The moment Macy was clear, the figure took out a sleek bow and fired a flaming green arrow just above the monster’s face; it howled in pain, hurling Macy into the air as it fell backwards.  The snapping of entire trees and the slam as it hit the ground drowned out the nast notes of its screeching metallic scream.

Macy had no time to worry about this; just as the green flame shot up a cloud of verdant smoke, she reached the peak of her ballistic trajectory and started falling.  She imagined herself a comet hurtling toward Ooo, the smell of smoke being the charring of her own rocky form, the whistling in her ears standing in for the screams of the panicked civilians.  She was going to impact soon, and much destruction would follow in her wake.

Then the cloaked figure caught her before she impacted, their momenta averaging out so that when she hit the ground, braced by her savior’s arms, it wasn’t so sudden.  It wasn’t the fall that hurt, nor the stop, but the suddenness of the stop; Macy had learned as much from Masse attempting to justify why his M&M character should definitely be allowed to jump onto a dragon’s back and kill it without dying from fall damage when the dragon inevitably crashed.  It was that suddenness which her rescuer had timed their leap to reduce.

Macy attempted to stand up, but the pain that shot through her leg convinced her to settle for sitting upright.  As the adrenaline rush postponed the coming onset of queasiness, she got a good look at the person who had saved her.  They were a green-skinned, pointy-eared humanoid, tall for a goblin but short in general, with a red tunic under their brown, pinecone-clasped cloak.  Over their head was a hood decorated with an extravagant set of tree-branch antlers. The bow they had drawn earlier was strapped to their back, along with a quiver of arrows with different-colored feather fletchings; around their belt was a small arsenal of other tools, all of which looked like they might have been created from the materials in this forest.  In the harsh light of the flame behind them, their leafy hair cast an intimidating shadow over their eyes, so that a smile which might have been calming instead emanated menace. Here was someone who was no doubt perfectly at home in a forest of monsters.

Macy, of course, knew who this must have been.  Standing before her was another great hero, a champion of the War that Never Was, and a keeper of balance in the natural world.  Of course someone like this would be Finn’s girlfriend; who else could match him? She should have known as soon as their place of residence had been explained.

The nut’s voice came out in a small gasp, betraying the awe she felt as she found herself, for the third time in as many days, in the company of legends.  “You’re Huntress Wizard.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now we see what “Flight of Fancy” has really been building toward: Huntress Wizard.
> 
> I guess I should probably pretend to be ambiguous about how important any of this is going to be in the long run, but I won't. Huntress Wizard is the reason this arc exists, and a big part of the reason this entire story exists. She will be Macy's mentor in heroism, and as a result her importance to the story will be nearly unrivalled among canon characters. Everything up until now has been about getting Macy into the position to meet Huntress Wizard, and the rest of the arc will be about establishing their dynamic and starting Macy on the path of apprenticeship. The Finn ruse was a distaction. (Okay, not entirely a distaction because Finn will also play a role, but not nearly as important a role as I had fauxshadowed.)
> 
> Toronto wasn't originally going to be in this chapter, but his inclusion isn't comparable to something like Mél in Chapter 2. Toronto was always going to appear eventually; his particular brand of selfishness and his inexplicably-effective rhetoric are fascinating, and “Son of Rap Bear” already proved he can function outside of the duo he formed with KOO. Introducing him here allowed me to give Macy a personal reason to hate him when he shows up again, but it didn't solve a huge, important problem like Mél did.
> 
> Robin, on the other hand _was_ always going to be in this chapter. Originally, I was just going to have Macy be alone for half the chapter and with Robin for the second half. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out a compelling way to write Macy alone for more than fifteen hundred words. I also had the same problem with Robin, which is why we don't get much from zhir perspective, although that problem is even worse because I have trouble writing zhir in general. It's tough to balance zhir jerkiness with making zhir actually sympathetic, even moreso because that balancing act can lead to zhir being too Jake-like. The way I'm getting around that problem is by giving zhir a different, unrelated set of neuroses to what Jake had.
> 
> Speaking of character voice, Masse probably sounds a bit different. He'll probably sound more like this from now on. To be honest, he wasn't very fleshed out in my head when I wrote “The Royal Banquet”; he's even harder to write than Robin, because when I started out I didn't really know what I wanted to do with him. Suffice to say that I do now; forcing myself to write his dialog gave me some ideas, and by now I'm three and a half chapters ahead and his character is pretty fixed in my mind.
> 
> I don't want to talk about what I'm doing with Huntress Wizard until next chapter for obvious reasons, so that leaves Princess Cookie. Honestly, as far as this chapter's concerned, there's not much to say about his character. Instead, let's talk about Mushrooms & Magi. Princeso is HHing (head honchoing, obviously) for Macy, Masse, & Robin from M&M 43e, which is actually several editions out of date but the rulebook's cheap. Rather than using the included campaign world, he's taken it upon himself to draft up a homebrew setting that he swears isn't just the Fionna & Cake universe. People believe him just as much as they believe Macy's one-armed human fighter isn't just Finn. Which is to say a lot, because this is the _Candy_ people we're talking about.
> 
> And now, a word from our ~~sponsor~~ next chapter:  
> “At the edges of her perception she felt the universe of her expanded awareness unraveling, revealing the patterns that underlay it all. She saw swirling galaxies and knew them to be atoms. The invisible cosmic breeze of light and of things lighter still, crossing eons in moments, folded over her, and she could feel in each particle a history older than time itself. The burning ball of chaotic energy she called the sun called back to her, and as she reached out to accept its invitation, her senses came rushing to meet her.”  
> Oh wait that's _way_ longer than a word.


	8. Huntress Spirit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Macy has finally met up with the mysterious Huntress Wizard, but while the young hero is eager to train under her, convincing the huntress to take her on as an apprentice may not be so simple.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, when I post the next chapter that'll mark the halfway point for the first “season” of Half Past Adventure! As celebration, I'll also be posting a flashfic about Huntress Wizard, set during an unspecified time period after the finale of AT but before the start of HPA. I've taken to referring to this period as “The Interval.” The flashfic is a bit experimental, told in a surreal, fairy-tale style, so take it with a grain of salt, but the general events are canon to HPA (even if the way they happen is definitely not). I'll be posting something like that to go along with every ninth chapter (so one every twenty-seven weeks), and they won't necessarily be buffered in the same way as normal chapters. They're ways for me to expand the world of HPA without distracting from the story and experiment with narrative in ways that the fic proper couldn't allow. If y'all have any sorts of things you want me to write about, that's the one thing I'd take requests for.
> 
> You've probably noticed by now that a lot of the recent chapters have had a much stronger emphasis on Macy's perspective than normal, and this chapter is no exception. That trend will continue for a couple more chapters; I can say that with confidence, having already written them. That's right, I have three and a half chapters of content written that I'm not sharing with anyone who isn't my alpha reader. It's either that or I start missing updates every time I fall into a funk, and nobody wants that, trust me.
> 
> Speaking of my alpha reader, Emmyllou, in case you've missed it remember to check out [her](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20492459) [stories](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19437610). She's also started another project, a postapocalyptic take on Stardew Valley, so look out for that at some point.
> 
> Anyway, I'm happy to announce that this chapter is less triggering and more gay than a lot of recent chapters were. How is this chapter gay when it's following Macy and Robin as they meet Finn's girlfriend? You'll just have to read the chapter to find out. Your conversation prompt this time is actually based on a deleted scene that maybe I'll talk about at some point if I ever reuse the concepts from it: What's a song that connects with you on a deep, personal level, especially if you're not entirely sure why?

“You’re Huntress Wizard.  Uh, I mean,  _ the _ Huntress Wizard.”

The forest denizen brushed a leafy bough of hair out of her face, allowing some of the dappled light shining through the canopy above to illuminate her green, slit-pupiled eyes.  Her brown cloak fluttered about her in the fire-churned breeze. In combination with her leafy antlers, the cloak cut a striking silhouette. There was an unforced stillness in her stance, in marked contrast with Macy’s queasy jittering; her mouth was held in a resolute frown, her eyebrows furrowed in concentration.  Here stood a beast of the hunt.

“Hey.”  The voice coming from the Huntress Wizard sounded a million times too casual.  “You okay?”

“Huh?”  Macy suddenly remembered that she had, in fact, been in  _ danger _ before she was saved.  “Oh, yeah, I’m—” She interrupted herself by barfing as she suddenly noticed the pain flowing through her entire body.  So that’s what adrenaline running out felt like.

“Yeah, you look pretty blargh.”  She took a sickly purple poultice out of a bark vial on her belt and spread it on Macy’s leg; it felt like an acidic fire.

“Owie!” shouted Macy, attempting to recoil but lacking the strength.  “That’s my blarghiest spot!”

Just then, there was a stirring and shifting from the log pile behind Macy.  The Huntress Wizard stepped back, nocking an arrow but keeping it pointed at the ground as if holding the planet hostage, as she stared down the emerging beast.  The shadow falling over her eyes anew gave her the appearance of some stealthy predator forced to prove its capability in broad daylight.

In the middle of the wrecked hut, a ferocious, seven-and-a-quarter-meter rainicorn-dog, all red, coiled into the air like a python.  Around it flared illusory flames in yellow and blue, a firespout of fury. “Don’t hurt my friend,” Robin bellowed, “or I will be forced to — oh, hey, it’s Huntress Wizard!”

Apparently unbaffled by the sudden shift in the rainicorn-dog’s voice, the Huntress Wizard replaced the bow and arrow and gave a small bow.  “Which one are you?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m Robin, T.V.’s grandpuppy,” said Robin, T.V.’s grandson, as zhe slouched into a conical pyramid and returned to zhir normal white-tan-blue-green-black color scheme, dismissing the other illusions with a flap of zhir black jowls.  “We’ve never met, but I’ve always admired your dedication, on account of I don’t have any myself.”

“Hm.”  The Huntress Wizard’s face darkened as she turned back to Macy’s leg.  Using a stick from the ruins of the hut as a splint, she took some broad leaves and spooled twine and cast Macy’s broken left leg from the hip down.  She then took two more sticks and ran her hands along them, magically smoothing them out; she pulled Macy up and handed them to her. “Let’s not stick around here too long.  You should be able to walk at least as far as our treehouse. Once we get back there I’ll whip up a proper remedy for whatever melange of ailments you’ve managed to accrue.”

Macy stood on her good (well, less bad) leg and two sticks, the latter of which sank into the soft dirt.  “Um, Huntress Wizard? I’m sorry, but what’s your name?”

“Huntress Wizard.”

“That’s convenient.”  A beat. “Oh, er, I’m Macy.  She/her.”

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” Robin interrupted, “but shouldn’t you do something about the imminent forest fire?”

“Fire is a part of the forest’s natural cycle,” intoned Huntress Wizard, pacing toward the green flame, the inrushing air causing the cloak to hug her form.  She raised an arm, and the fire danced in parallel. “Fire beats away the brush, keeping the risk of a larger conflagration minimal.” She raised the other arm, and now there was a glowing green pyramid before her which reminded Macy of the hut which the Root Sword had lain low.  “Fire takes that which is dead and turns it into a palate for new life.” She brought her arms together and then spread them apart; a great green fireball burst, sending a pulsing heatwave through the forest, singing Macy’s eyebrows. “But as with all living things, so too must fire die.”  She carved a great circle in the air with her arms before plunging them down into the ground. The conflagration before her imitated the motion, roaring to life one final time before quickly receding to iron embers.

“What?” asked Macy.  The snap, crackle, and pop of the fire, combined with HW facing the other way the whole time, had kept her and Robin from hearing a single word of that spiel.

* * *

Robin had volunteered to stay behind and pack up the supplies the two had brought while Huntress Wizard escorted Macy to her home.  Zhir stated reason was because zhe didn’t want to leave it out in the open, and the obvious ulterior motive was Macy’s injury-and-illness-induced elevated slowness attribute, but Macy suspected that the rainicorn-dog simply didn’t want to give away the secret of how zhe was able to carry all that stuff in the first place out of the misguided belief that it made zhir seem mysterious.  Whether this was more of zhir usual hijinks or zhe felt a need to out-mysterious the huntress, Macy was less sure.

Speaking of the huntress, she was darting between the trees ahead of Macy, moving in and out of sight as she pinballed through the forest.  She didn’t go far enough ahead that Macy was in danger of losing track of her, even in her weakened state; that didn’t mean she didn’t strain her eyes trying to follow the huntress’s movements.  At last she called out, “Hey! What are you doing?”

HW paused, dangling upside-down off of a tree branch.  “I’m making sure we aren’t being followed by any wild monsters.”

“That would be bad,” said Macy, picking up the pace to the best of her meager ability.

“Yes, it would.  We only have the one guest room.”  She leapt out of the tree and began walking alongside Macy.  “We should be clear for now. How are you holding up? Are you in any pain?”

“No,” Macy lied.

A shadow fell over HW’s face.  “That is bad. That is very, very bad.”

“Wait, no, I mean—”  Macy didn’t have a chance to articulate her response before Huntress Wizard scooped her up, walking sticks and all, and began running through the forest.  “Oh.” Blood rushed to Macy’s carapaced cheeks.

“You don’t seem to be very used to wild life,” the huntress observed as she parkoured through the trees.

Macy’s blush grew so hot she worried it would be tangible through her shell.  “Oh, er, is it really that obvious?”

“No, I mean you must have come to the forest for a reason.  As protector of the balance of this forest, I would be remiss if I did not inquire as to what that reason might be.”

“It’s you, actually.”  Her cheeks were now practically smoldering.  “I was hoping you could, um, well, that is to say, maybe you could quite possibly hopefully teach me some stuff?”

“My domain is nature, and nature is its own teacher.”

Macy blinked a bug out of her eyes.  “So, is that a no, or…?”

“Not exactly.  You see, I — oh hey.”

“What is it?”

“We’re here,” announced the huntress, waving her hands to part a drape of vines.  Macy stepped forward, walking sticks first, into a clearing the size of the mess hall at Bubblegum Castle; even the boughs above twisted into similar arches and trusses.  The chorus of animal noises swelled into a symphony as she swept her awed gaze about the glade. This was by far the brightest place in the Evil Forest — unfiltered sunlight shone in patches through skylights in the canopy, making a rainbow of the leftover rain dripping from the leaves..

Once she reached the exact center, she paused but a moment before leaping into the air, her form smoothly flowing with her momentum into that of a hummingbird.  Macy followed to the point where she had last stood, but then she was unsure what to do next. Was she expected to follow suit? With her broken leg, Macy wasn’t sure how high she could jump.  Also, less importantly, she had no idea how to turn into a hummingbird.

Never one to let the laws of physics get in her way, she stepped forward, spinning one of the walking sticks ostentatiously before accidentally sending it flying backwards.  She imagined herself on a stage, attempting to cross through a perilous obstacle course made of bramble bushes and brutalist pyramids and unopened letters from childhood friends.  As she geared up to attempt the first obstacle, she gazed out at the judges — Huntress Wizard, Tiffany, and Ambassador Corn. The ambassador was shaking her head forlornly, her mind clearly already made up.  Macy gulped, her arms shaking; it took all her willpower to steady them before her polished black walking sticks slipped. She might have vomited from nerves, but that was getting a bit played out.

She took a step forward with one good leg and found herself at the far end of the obstacle course, having just slayed a massive grass dragon.  She turned to look at the judges, who were writing out their scorecards. At last, HW held up a sign on which she had presumably once written a number, but which was now smudged beyond legibility as the damp ink dripped off.  “Three!” she yawned.

Tiffany raised his disco-ball hand into the air and turned it on, glitching into various aerial contortions as the disco ball remained stationary and blared lullabies.  “Eight!” he shouted.

Ambassador Corn stared at Macy for one million years before she held up her own sign, on which was written the copyright information for  _ A Collector’s Guide to Coinage, Vo. 47 _ by Lionel Rednose.  “Four!” she called out in Huntress Wizard’s voice.

Then something clonked Macy on the head; she stumbled onto her broken leg, snapping the makeshift splint, and in a flash of searing pain she blacked out.

* * *

When Macy came to, she was lying down on a carved wooden couch, swaddled in a fur blanket with her broken leg dangling in a bucket of pungent green sludge.  Her first instinct was to yank it out in disgust, but she had learned her lesson about sudden movements. As she sat up, her joints complaining the whole time, her eyes gradually focused on a stranger sitting on the other end of the couch: a salmonberry about Macy’s size, wearing a light brown pelt and hearty leather gloves.

“Urgh, what happened?”  Macy moaned, her mind bleary with a blistering migraine.

“You’re finally awake,” observed the stranger.  “You were trying to find my girlfriend, right? Walked right under the lift as she was lowering it, same as your friend.”

She pointed over to the a door at the other end of the room; Macy followed her gesture before her gaze drifted upward.  Idly, she noted that the ceiling’s thatching was much more waterproof than the hut Robin had made. This fact made her regret accidentally tearing down said hut with the Root Sword slightly less.  “My friend?” Macy asked, though she knew the answer.

“The rainicorn-dog.  Zhe said zhe was a friend of yours, at the very least.  Zhe’s in the other room restocking on herbs with Hunnybuns.  Huntress Wizard, that is,” she clarified.

“Hunnybuns?  What, are you her girlfriend?”

“Indeed.”

The aching nut scratched her head; even that effort was taxing.  “I thought she was  _ Finn’s _ girlfriend.”

“Oh, she is.”

“Neat. You say she and Robin are in the other room?”  Macy sat up fully; the motion made her lightheaded. “I need to talk to her.  To zhir. To them.” She moved to get up, and her vision swam. She focused on a large round table in the middle of the room to recenter herself.  “Ugh, I can’t move! Would you mind — excuse me, I can’t believe I’ve been so rude. What’s your name?”

“Razz.  She/her.”

“Razz, would you mind getting my friend and your girlfriend?”

“Of course I will.”  She turned to face a door on the other side of the room next to which indirect light dripped in from a circular window.  “Hey dillweed, get out here and talk to your rotting guests!” she shouted.

“Just a moment!” shouted HW from the other side of the door.  After a mess of clattering, she threw open the door and walked into the room, followed by Robin carrying a towering pile of jars of herbs in zhir arms.  As soon as zhe had stepped out of the door zhe dropped the bottles in a clattering heap.

“Hey Macy!” said Robin, fishing a jar out of the pile and reaching inside.  “I got your phone for you. I also brought all your other stuff in the spare bedroom.”

Robin tossed the phone to Macy, who managed to catch it despite her lethargy.  “Uh, thanks, Binny,” she muttered. “Huntress Wizard—”

“You can call me HW,” insisted HW.

“—HW, will you please be my teacher?”

There followed a long stretch of silence, save for three rhythmic sounds: the ever-present din of forest life, the drumming of rain on the roof above, and Razz repeating the word, “Yes!” under her breath.  Only one of these sounds should have cut out when Huntress Wizard raised her hand, but all three vanished, as if in anticipation.

“No.”

“What!?” Macy shouted before immediately regretting speaking so loudly as she was sent into a coughing fit.  “What?” she repeated much quieter.

Before HW could answer, Robin stretched a bit to put a paw on Macy’s shoulder.  “You should call your dad and tell him where you are; elsewise he’ll be worried aboutcha.  The rest of us three’ll leave the room so y’all two can talk in private.”

“But what about—”

“Why, yes, that’s a good idea,” said Razz in a monotone as she got up from the couch.  “Why don’t we leave you to your device now? Come along, girlfriend and stranger.”

As they walked into the other room, Huntress Wizard closing the door behind them, Macy could her Robin whisper, “You’re a  _ terrible _ actor.”

The herb room was exactly what one would expect — a well-insulated, dimly-lit room filled with jars of various kinds of herbs, spices, and minerals, which smelled like a kitchen for rock golems.  Even once Robin shrunk zhirself to half zhir usual indoor size, between the awkward shape and the protruding shelves the room wasn’t large enough to comfortably fit three people. Robin V. flattened zhirself against one corner, Huntress Wizard tucked herself into the other, and Razz Wildberry stood in front of the door, her ear pressed against the oaken frame.

The eavesdropping berry waited until she was sure Macy had begun speaking with her father before she turned to address the room.  “What’s this about?” she whispered.

“What do you think?” Robin whispered back.  “It’s about The Huntress What Also Be A Wizard not wanting to train my best friend just because she got a little dry in the nose.”

“What about it?” asked Razz, suddenly on the defensive.

“I want to know her reason why this entire trip was in vain, and I don’t want Macy to hear it because the last thing she needs right now is negative reinforcement.”

“It’s nothing personal,” assured Huntress Wizard.  “I don’t think she’s weak or untalented, if that’s what you’re implying.  If anything, after hearing your description of events, she shows a lot of room for growth.  Unfortunately, nature doesn’t reward potential. But that’s not the real reason I don’t want to teach her.  The truth is, I don’t think she has the huntress spirit.”

“Macy’s got plenty of spirit!” Robin half-shouted; she immediately corrected her volume.  “She’s the most spirited person I know, and I’m  _ part _ spirit!”

“She does seem to have spirit,” HW conceded.  “Otherwise she wouldn’t have pressed on this far in the face of such adversity from the forest itself.  She has  _ warrior _ spirit — as you told me, she came all this way because she wants to be a hero.  That’s not the same thing as huntress spirit, and I don’t think someone who doesn’t sport that specific spirit can spontaneously aspire to be a spuntress.”

“Spose you’re spright; I still say Macy’s different.  She’s overflowing with passion. She’s got passion for days.  She’s got so much passion even her hobbies have hobbies.”

Razz did a knee-bent head-tilt.  “What does that have to do with having huntress spirit?  Her level of drive isn’t the issue here.”

Huntress Wizard nodded in agreement.  “Regardless of passion, if she isn’t specifically passionate about being a huntress, she won’t have the patience for it.”  She turned around and placed a hand on the wall dramatically. “I’m not a teacher by trade; I’m a keeper of balance in the universe.  It is not in the best interest of balance to train one who is uninterested in the preservation of that balance. For that reason, I must reserve my training for one who is unreserved in their interest in preservation.”

“Hunnybuns, you’re rambling into the corner again.”

“My foul,” said Huntress Wizard, turning around; a deep verdant brush was now visible on her bright green face.  “All I’m really saying is I want to make sure she’s really following her passion.”

“Well, what about  _ my _ passion?” asked Robin dispassionately.  “Nature is my whole deal; can you train me?”

The goblin squinted long and hard at the rainicorn-dog, her eyes darting across zhir form and the invisible aura which surrounded it.  “Yes,” she said at last, “if you’re willing to—”

“Never mind, that already sounds like too much work.”  Zhe sighed in a convincing affectation of weariness.

“It sounds like she’s done with her call,” Razz whispered.  She smiled softly at HW. “If there’s no changing your mind, it’s time we figure out how to break the news.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Robin as zhe walked over to the door.  “I figured this was the most likely outcome, so I had Macy call her pop so’s that he’ll tell her to come home.”

HW crossed her arms and smirked.  “In other words, this whole conversation was a waste of time, right?”

“You could say that,” zhe conceded, pushing the door open without looking.  “Or you could say that I’ve gotten Macy into a position where there’s no possible way she’ll remain convinced she can stay here for the next week.”

“Good news!” Macy called out as soon as Robin entered her line of sight.  “Dad said I can stay here for the next week!”

* * *

In the moments before receiving Macy’s call, her father the Duke of Nuts had been in a diplomatic meeting with an emissary from Lumpy Space.  What was supposed to be a serious conversation about census sharing and judiciary compliance, wherein the involved parties would pore through the various legal documents spread across the chestnut table before them in the most boring conference room in the castle, had deteriorated.  By now, the lumpy emissary was on his fourth diatribe about how some band he’d liked as a child was lame suddenly because other people liked them now. The Duke did not know how this related to the politics of interdimensional bookkeeping, and he suspected that if he did, the knowledge would drive him mad.

For this reason, when his phone started vibrating, he was glad for any excuse to be distracted; when he saw that the number was from his daughter who had just ran away from home, he was ecstatic.  “Excuse me,” he said, “would you mind if I take this call?”

“Ugh, how rude,”whined the emissary.  “This is supposed to be a serious diplomatic talk.”

“Yes, you’re absolutely right,” said the Duke.  “But, um, if you’ll excuse me, I need to tie my shoes.”

“What-ever, just don’t take too long.  I’m just getting to the good part, and I want you to pay attention.”

The Duke dove beneath the table and, crouching low to the ground, slinked out into the hall as the emissary continued monologuing unflaggingly.

“Macy!” he shouted gleefully as soon as he answered the phone.  “Oh my Glob how are you? Are you okay? Please come home, I’m so sorry about everything!”

“I’m fine,” came a distinctly un-fine-sounding voice from the phone’s speakers.  “Got a bit lost. I’m coming home soon. I’m really sorry for running.”

“No, I’m sorry for coming between you and your dream.”  He sighed, sitting back against the door with its simple square pattern.  “I’m glad you’re coming back, but I understand why you ran. You have a lot of passion, and if you want to direct that toward being a hero, it’s better for you to do that in a relatively safe environment than to not exercise it at all.  I… I still stand by not wanting you to get involved in political shell games,” he admitted. “I probably won’t change my mind about that, but I could have explained myself better. You deserved to understand why I was restraining you.”

“No, yeah, I… I think I get it,” Macy answered.  “I’ve made a series of breakthroughs in a distressingly short amount of time since I left.  I still want to be an adventurer, but now I get why you wanted me to slow down. And now I know that I need to do this in the proper order.”

“The proper order?”

“I need to get skilled enough to take care of myself, to know how to handle any tough situation, before I can take on the responsibility that comes with being an adventurer.  That way you won’t need to worry about me.”

There was a wisdom beyond her years in those words, the Duke realized.  This saddened him for two reasons. First, such a wisdom likely came from hardship; he had no trouble imagining where Macy might have experienced that level of stress.  She had been in an orphanage at twelve years of age, after all.

The second reason for his sorrow was much more selfish:  The fact that Macy had realized this meant that, had he bothered to explain himself properly in the garden, she would have understood him and potentially bypassed whatever misadventures she had gone on over the past two days, sparing him his current heartache at the expense of whatever else she had learned.

“I’ll never stop worrying,” he assured her.  “But from now on, I’ll be better at sharing my worries.  You deserve explanations; you’re smart enough to handle that much, at the very least.  You’re brilliant, Macy.”

“Thanks, Dad.”  He could almost hear her blushing.

“So, when are you coming home?  Should I pick you up?”

“I’ll probably head back when I’ve shrugged off this virus/toxin/broken-leg combo platter I’ve got going on.”

“I’m sorry, shrugged off the  _ what _ platter?”

Macy then related an abridged version of the previous two days’ events to her dad, starting with jumping into a snake’s favorite pond and ending with getting her own personal thundercloud.  She very specifically did not mention getting clonked on the head, and she would very much like it if nobody ever mentioned that for the rest of her life.

“Well, I won’t say that’s not worrying,” said the Duke, “but it sounds like the best thing for you to do right now is stay put.  In fact, you’re probably far safer with HW than you would be if you tried to come back here.”

“Do you know her?” inquired Macy.

“We’re acquainted.  We fought side-by-side in the Gum War, actually.”

“Mathematical.”

The Duke stood up, pressing a hand to the door; from the sound of it, the emissary was still talking, but there was no telling how long that would last.  “Well, stay there as long as you like, as long as you don’t stay there too long.  I think it’s a very good idea to have her train you.”

“But she doesn’t want to,” Macy moaned.  “She thinks I don’t have the huntress spirit.”

“Well then.”  He felt like he needed to give her something, to make up for what he had tried to take.  “Show her what you  _ do _ have.”

“Huh.  Alright, I’ll try that.  Love you, Dad.”

“And I love you, Macy.  See you soon.” And then he hung up and slipped back into the conference room, crawling under the table and then popping up in his seat, his ostentatious purple had scuffed.  “I’m done tying my shoes,” he announced.

“Took you long enough,” complained the emissary.  “This is why I’m so glad my species doesn’t have feet.  That, and they’re way grody.”

_ So this is my punishment for being a bad father. _   “Speaking of grody, let’s talk about extradition…”

* * *

“What do you mean, ‘show me what you have?’” asked Huntress Wizard, sitting on a simple two-board chair across from Macy.  “Are we talking a bartering situation? Because I already have enough pinecones.” She tugged at her cloak’s clasp as if to demonstrate.

“No,” said Macy, sounding much more energetic than she had just five minutes ago.  “I was thinking something more like I would do all kinds of foresty stuff with you to prove that I’m worthy of being your apprentice.”

“I think it’s a great idea.”  Razz stepped behind her girlfriend and began massaging her shoulders.  “Forest life can be oh so monotonous, and we could always use an extra pair of hands on hunt.”

HW looked up at Razz, a soft smile on her face.  “Not your hands, though, eh? They’re too soft and dainty?”

“Why, you absolute  _ gator!” _   The berry playfully tugged on one of the goblin’s tree-branch antlers, and the pair burst out laughing.

“Not to interrupt anything,” Robin interrupted as zhe morphed into a crutch, “but is that a yes?”

“Yes,” asked Macy as she stood up, her vision swimming like a flexing salmon, “is that a yes?”

“Yes,” asked Razz in a tone of voice that Macy wasn’t supposed to know the implications of yet, “is that a yes?”

HW smiled, put a hand on Razz’s cheek, and said in a soft voice, “Still no.”

“Aw, man!”  Robin drooped, forcing Macy to wobble a bit so as to avoid putting weight on her recently-recast leg.

“Look, you can stay while you recover, and I’ll teach you some survival tips.  But I still don’t think it would be wise for me to take you on as an actual apprentice.”

“But until then I can hang around?” Macy asked.

“Sure you can.  The forest belongs to no one; I couldn’t do more than ask you to leave anyway.  But…” She narrowed her eyes. “If you stay longer than five days, you’ll make W— your dad sad, so I’d recommend that you leave before then.”

“So what you’re saying is I have less than five days to convince you.”

HW raised an eyebrow at Macy.  “You have the heart of a charging rhinoceros, I’ll grant you.  Just focus on recovering for now, and  _ then _ you can worry about doing the impossible.”

“What does ‘focus on recovering’ mean for me?”

Razz grimaced.  “Have you ever drank a healing potion before?”

“No.”  She leaned forward, excited.

“Then this’ll be unpleasant.”

* * *

One extremely unpleasant potion later, Macy was feeling much better.  Her leg was still broken, the potion had left a rancid taste in her mouth, and she was as lethargic as ever, but with Robin’s help and some tea Razz brewed up she could move again.  Relatively speaking, she felt like she could take on the world, and as a result she was anxious to do so at the earliest possible opportunity.

“Come on, Robin,” she said, brandishing the Root Sword much more wildly than was safe.  “Let’s go outside and mess something up.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Macy’s crutch.

“Why not?”  She pushed open the front door of thehut with one arm while waving a cheerful yet tired goodbye to Razz with the other.  “You don’t think I can take a flame-possum?”

“No, because—”

Then Macy thrust Robin down into empty air and the two began to fall off the balcony of the treehouse and onto the clearing a dozen meters below.  Macy could still see the impact on the ground from when she had blacked out and was not eager to repeat the experience. Thinking quickly, she swung Robin around in the air; zhe half-unmorphed, gripping onto the edge of the platform which formed the balcony.  Macy jerked to a halt, feeling like her arm was going to be ripped out of its socket. She and Robin swung like a pendulum, and as Macy looked up, she realized that the balcony hung on ropes attached to a pulley system — that must have been what hit her before.

“—because that,” Robin finished.

A whiff of must and petrichor greeted Macy as zhe stretched her to the ground.  Last night’s storm had left behind a rain-puddle in the clearing beneath the treehouse, which a black-furred, white-antlered deer was now drinking from.  It looked up at the nut as she touched down, resisting the urge to jump the last half-meter. The shadow of the treehouse hidden in the canopy fell before its hooves as if bowing to its majesty.  Macy averted her gaze, not wanting to disturb the creature.

“So what’s your plan to impress HW?” asked Robin as zhe morphed back into a crutch.

“That’s simple,” replied Macy, pointing up with one finger as if she were calling the canopy uncomplicated.  “At some point while we’re staying here, I do something amazing that impresses her so much she  _ has _ to train me.”

“I don’t think you should try to do something amazing right after breaking your leg,” zhe cautioned.

“I know, I know,” she assured zhir, following the path HW had led her along.  “I’m just going to scout out the area so I know what amazing things I’ll be able to do later.”

“Great, so do you have any ideas?”

“I’ve got one.”

“What is it?”

“I’m lost.”  Macy sat down on a tree root, careful not to put any weight on her broken leg as she descended.

“That’s impossible; we’ve been out here for like fifteen seconds.”

“This is fine,” said Macy, mostly to reassure herself.  She spotted a nearby rock with moss growing on it. “Okay, we can use that to figure out where north is.”

“How does that help us?”

Macy blinked.  “We know where north is…?  I’m gonna be honest, when the Marshmallow Rangers were explaining all this stuff to us I spaced out for half the presentation and forgot what the next step was.”

“I think the idea was that you keep track of the direction you’re going and then use the cardinal directions to help find the path you’d already taken.”

Macy pushed herself up, grabbing a fallen branch to use as a crutch.  “That’s it!” She scanned the ground and saw the faint imprints left by her feet moments prior.  “Between my incredible eyesight and your famous nose, we can simply follow our own trail! It’s so obvious it’s brilliant!”  She began walking back through the curtain of vines.

Robin trotted a pace behind, teasing Macy.  “I don’t think you invented the concept of retracing your steps.”

“So what?” she asked, whirling around to face zhir.  “It got us un-lost, didn’t I?”

“After you got us lost, and after an embarrassingly short amount of time, too.”

Macy walked backwards so she could continue her conversation.  “I say it breaks even.”

“It really doesn’t.”

“Admit it; you’re just jealous I’m a better woodsnut than—”

Suddenly Macy backed right into something; nervously, she turned around, to see that another pitch-black deer was drinking at the pond, and now both of them were staring at her angrily.  The antlered one began scraping its hoof against the ground and huffing while the other one backed up. Macy didn’t know much about deer, but that seemed like a bad omen.

With a snort, it charged toward the terrified nut.  Just before it hit her a green shadow leapt from the trees and halted it in its tracks.  A third, green-furred deer had appeared from nowhere and locked antlers with it. The newcomer reared back, tossing the aggressive buck into a tree at the edge of the clearing.  With a whine, it scampered off, its companion following shortly behind.

The green deer shifted into Huntress Wizard, flaunting a leafy robe as she glowered disapproval at Macy.  “Are you trying to get yourself gored?” she reprimanded. “Those are Heck Deer!”

Macy bit her tongue; she could tell that “I was walking backwards talking to my friend after getting lost” wasn’t going to win her any favor in the huntress’s wizard eyes.  She decided to go with a simple, “I’m sorry.”

“Is something going on down there?” called Razz.  “I’m lowering the platform.”

“What?”  HW glanced up, panicked.  “No, don’t—” Then it came down on her head and she landed right in the indent Macadamia had left behind earlier in the day.

Macy snickered as she hopped onto the platform.  “Are you trying to get yourself knocked out?” she asked, stretching out a hand to help HW up.  She said nothing in response.

* * *

Huntress Wizard had not found the incident as humorously ironic as Macy did, so she requested the nut to stay in the treehouse for the rest of the day, gently chastising her girlfriend for not keeping her in the house from the start.  After giving Macy a list of creatures to steer clear of and what was dangerous about them (in short: “all of them” and “everything”), she went onto the roof to continue her meditation. Macy and Robin had attempted to meditate with her, but Macy got distracted by the pain in her leg, so Robin had to help escort her inside.  Eventually, HW got frustrated and left to go collect dinner.

“Aw, math,” said Macy as Razz waved off her girlfriend like a rich girl in a twenty-first century sitcom, “I can’t even do nothing right.”

“That’s just because you’d rather do  _ something,” _ Robin assured her.  “You’re mind’s too active.  It’s not a personal failing; you’re just wired differently.”

“Maybe you’re right.  I just need to do something that plays better to my strengths.”  She grasped her head with one hand, clenching her walking-stick tight with the other.  “Augh, but what  _ are _ those?”

“You’re pretty smart,” zhe offered.  “You’re a fast learner, and you’re capable of reading and interpreting other peoples’ facial expressions.”

“Yeah, but what can I do that’s nature-related and involves my brain?”  She carelessly tossed the book to the side. “I just can’t think of a single feasible option.”

At this point Razz piped up.  “I have an idea! You could help me with my brewing.  I could always use an extra pair of hands, and they say a healing potion always tastes better when you’ve mixed it yourself.”

“That sounds like something that probably won’t backfire.”  Macy turned to face Robin. “Do you want to help?”

“Nah, I’m gonna go meditate on the roof some more.  Doing nothing is basically my idealized state of consciousness.”  Zhe morphed away zhir limbs and slithered out a window.

Razz led Macy into the dank herb cellar in which she had held the conspiratorial meeting before.  It was all new to Macy — the bombarding leafy aroma, the moderated wetness of the wood, the absolute tesseract of shelving — but the berry picked her way around the place with practiced ease.

“I have several potions I’m brewing in the back room,” she explained, climbing onto one shelf to reach another near the ceiling, “but —  _ oof! _ — the most important is the next batch of healing potion.  For this one we’ll focus mostly on your leg.”

Macy ran a finger along the label of a bottle in front of her; the ornate handwriting was nearly as fancy as Masse’s.  She imagined her old friend meticulously labeling a room full of plants, then getting bored halfway through and convincing one of the younger orphans to give him half their lunch for the honor of getting to label them instead.  Princeso would be too impressed by the originality to be mad; with the benefit of distance, Macy was free to wonder whether that would truly be a boon. “Bitterness breeds growth,” she mused.

“Oh!” exclaimed Razz, wobbling on the creaky shelf.  “What an excellent way of phrasing it! I’ll have to steal that one from you, if it’s alright.”

“Algebraic.”  She picked up the bottle and held it up to the slanting light from a slatted window; apparently it was poppy.  “So what exactly makes this healing potion different from the last one?”

“A healing potion is all about aiding the body’s natural recovery capabilities while providing it with the resources it needs to replenish itself.”  She grabbed several jars and hopped down onto the floor with a thud. “The first potion was mostly concentrated on fighting whatever infection you caught in the river, so I used streptomyces and artemisia.  This one will need a wide variety of minerals to foster bone growth, such as kale, bran, and — could you fetch some raisins? We have a jar drying by the far window.”

Macy obliged, and Razz continued to explain the mechanics of potioncraft as they collected materials.  She laid out the strategy — choose a base that’s easily digestible, select an array of plants designed to provide whatever the body needs, prepare in a specific way for a specific amount of time with specific spells to draw out and enhance the mixture’s healing potency.  She showed Macy the best way to stir a brewing potion so that all of the ingredients are fully mixed; she guided her through the steps of chopping, kneading, pressing, and drying herbs before incorporating them; she even let the nut shake up a jar of cream that would be used to garnish a pastry of contentedness she had been brewing for a while.

“I don’t hear it sloshing anymore,” said Macy, no longer able to feel her arms as she continued to agitate the contents of the jar.  “Is this really important?”

“Never underestimate the value of presentation.”  Razz tapped herself on the forehead with a wet stirring spoon.  “Half the work of a potion is done in the mind, you know. Ah, but to answer your question:  No, it’s not important in the slightest.”

“Then I’m just going to say I’m done.”  She set the jar on a table in the overwarm back room; the stench of the three brewing potions, one of which Razz said had been steeping for several weeks, overwhelmed Macy’s senses.  She was too distracted to even hallucinate. “When’s your girlfriend getting back?”

“Oh, soon.”  She went back to stirring the contentedness batter before her; a great bubble of calm burst, drawing a deep sigh out of both of them.  “Would you like to taste-test this?”

“Sure, why not?”  Macy stood up, bracing against her walking-stick and suppressing a yawn.  She hobbled her way over and dipped a still-numb finger in the cauldron. As she brought it to her lips, an image of herself and her dad popped into her mind.  They were sitting on a smooth crystal couch, tossing out tiny sandwiches for chocolate birds to eat while Macy and Marceline strummed a wordless lullaby on their respective instruments.  Macy found herself losing her grip on the edge of the couch and slipping into an endless mercury cavern, where the mellifluous mating songs of jays and magpies drew her ever deeper into a jungle of linen drapes.

Just before she hit the ground, she caught herself on a tree branch and was brought back to reality a second before actually impacting the floor, a line of drool coming from her mouth.  The good news was that she could feel her arm again. The bad news was that it hurt.

“How was it?” Razz asked as Macy pulled herself up, in the tone of voice one uses when asking a question to which one already knows the answer.

Macy thought for a moment.  “Right now it’s less ‘contentedness’, more ‘complacency’,” she decided.  “It needs a bit more zest.”

“Right then.  Could you grab the lemon zest?”

* * *

A short while later, as the sky began showing its first tinge of auburn, Huntress Wizard returned.  She flew up to the balcony as a swallow and transformed back in a hero’s landing, her shadow falling over the forest behind her like a curtain on a stage.  She gave her girlfriend a hug before releasing a lever and bringing the balcony back down. When she came up once more, she gestured proudly to a heck deer carcass with an arrow protruding from its side.  Razz clapped her gloved hands with delight; Macy, for her part, feared briefly that her illness might have returned, so she excused herself to call Robin down for supper.

All throughout dinner, Macy had to restrain herself from revealing the role she had played in the dessert, hoping to surprise her future mentor.  Razz had made no attempt to hide the transference of the batter to the ceramic oven as soon as the venison was done cooking, but she hadn’t mentioned at all Macy’s involvement.  Even as Macy drank the healing potion she herself had brewed she didn’t mention it — not even to Robin, for she knew the rainicorn-dog didn’t have much in the way of an internal filter.

Consequently, Macy didn’t contribute much at all to the direction of the dinner conversation, which turned toward the subject of politics.  As a burgeoning marquess, Macy figured she should do her best to pay attention, but frankly it was all too boring for her. From what she could gather, Princess Bubblegum had once laid claim to the Evil Forest until a group of druids led by HW’s magic teacher had forced her to declare it (along with several other regions) as a preserve.  This ruling was enforced by some international treaty or other, which was now being renegotiated by a debate over a completely unrelated stretch of land on the other side of Ooo, which meant that some minor kingdom might now own the forest. Apparently Razz thought that this presented a threat to the security of the forest, Robin believed that it would make the forest easier to protect it in case of catastrophe, and Huntress Wizard didn’t care what happened as long as the balance of nature was kept.

Following entirely too much of that, it was finally time for Razz to produce the pastries of contentedness.  HW raised an eyebrow at Macy’s zipper-lipped smile and nervous one-leg jittering, but she refrained from commenting.  Robin smelled the wafting aroma of the pastry as it was removed from the oven and began to melt; the buttons woven into zhir tail turned into a maraca as zhe wagged it in delight.

Razz entered the room with a curtsy, holding the pastry above her head on a silver platter.  “In honor of our esteemed guests,” she proclaimed, “I present this sacred ambrosia. Through long toil, and with the assistance of the Marquess of Nuts, it has been prepared.”

“She let you help her out?  She doesn’t even let  _ me _ help her out.”  Huntress Wizard sounded genuinely impressed.  Macy let out a squeal of delight as Razz set the pastry on the center of the table.

She removed her gloves for the first time since Macy had gotten here and picked up a large knife.  “May the spirits of the forest be pleased with the offering of the first slice,” she recited, carving a sizeable wedge from the pastry.

She took care not to disturb it too much as she gingerly excavated it from the remaining pastry.  Holding it like a baby, she walked toward the window with measured pace. The air around her seemed to hum as she proceeded, each trancelike step echoing with the weight of a thousand unseen others.

Then she yote it through the window with an angry shout.  She spun around on one foot, dusting off her hands before slipping them back into her gloves with an excited finger-wiggle.  She carved recklessly into the pastry, scattering contentedness flakes every which way as she slapped uneven slices onto everyone’s greasy plates.   _ “Bon appetit!” _

Macy picked up a fork, trying not to think of what HW may have carved it from, and dug in.  As she chewed, a tingling rush of power flowed through her; within her a suite of senses fit for the mightiest of dragons roared to life.  At the edges of her perception she felt the universe of her expanded awareness unraveling, revealing the patterns that underlay it all. She saw swirling galaxies and knew them to be atoms.  The invisible cosmic breeze of light and of things lighter still, crossing eons in moments, folded over her, and she could feel in each particle a history older than time itself. The burning ball of chaotic energy she called the sun called back to her, and as she reached out to accept its invitation, her senses came rushing to meet her.  She zoomed in through a cloud of shattered comets, through the atmosphere of the broken earth, through the winding lines of magic which crisscrossed Ooo in a mosaic of fluctuating power, through the bustling vines of the forest in setting sunlight, and through the slatted window behind her, just as she swallowed that perfect bite.

Then a harsh aftertaste pulled her tongue inside itself.  Her mouth dried and her lips puckered. “Sour,” she rasped.

Razz looked as taken aback by the flavor as Macy felt, yet she gave a small nod of approval.  “It’s not bad,” she lied as Robin entered a coughing fit.

Huntress Wizard set down her fork, not having touched the pastry yet, although the whipped cream that had been slathered atop it was gone.  She turned to Macy with a knowing look in her eye. “To a child, complacency and contentedness look much the same,” she said. Then she picked up her slice and placed it back into the pastry.  “The whipped topping was good, though.”

Macy decided she’d take what fortune offered.  “Thanks.”

* * *

That night, swathed in one of HW’s spare leafy ropes so that Razz could wash that ratty old hoodie, Macadamia the Nut dreamed of dragons.  She was reliving a dream she had dreamt many times before: She, Finn, Jake, and a group of miscellaneous other heroes were standing in the middle of a constantly-shifting plain, defending a hot dog village from kiting dragons.  As usual, Finn took a nasty bite to the side, which sent him reeling. Macy caught his body in his arms, letting out a familiar howl of rage. Wasting no time, she picked up his blade — a highly stylized, questionably accurate version of the Night Sword — and his slack, like always.

This next part was new.  Once Macy had slain the dragon that had lain low the one-handed hero, another dragon burst forth from its corpse — a dragon made of sparking purple energy, as if it had been sculpted from pure magic, covered from head to toe in a thousand eyes which blinked in waves.  Macy handed the sword off to some other hero and approached the dragon, hands outstretched to indicate she meant no harm. It bestowed upon her a draconic smooch and shattered into pure chaos energy. Macy reached into the carcass from which it sprang, withdrawing a pristine bow made of bone-white chocolate, and began firing.

Robin tossed the Night Sword zhe had just received from paw to paw as zhe reverted to zhir true form.  It really wasn’t a very good replica, which was unsurprising since Macy had no firsthand experience with the blade.  Still, zhir friend’s dreams didn’t seem to be more troubled than usual, so zhe opened a trapdoor in the rock/grass/glass floor of the field and hopped out of Macy’s mindscape.

Zhe exited through one of zhir own ruby eyes onto the roof of the treehouse, where distant stars twinkled above what few trees rose beyond.  Zhe noticed several inaccuracies in zhir own mental projection of the scene, which immediately rectified themselves. As zhir tail emerged, zhe turned around and waved zhir paw in front of the face of zhir meditating self.  “Man, now I remember why I don’t do this often,” zhe said. “This is weird.”

“You get used to it,” came a voice from behind zhir; zhe stepped around zhir body to see zhir great-aunt Charlie, wearing a camouflaged dress and shuffling a deck of playing cards in her paws.  “At the very least, I did. Are you ready to talk now?”

“I think so.  I gotta say, I wasn’t expecting to hear from you so soon.  Or ever, really.”

“Viola came and told me pretty immediately after she got T.V.’s prismgram about your prismgram.”  Charlie began placing cards in front of herself and Robin. “I’ve been saving up what little magical power I could for over a decade, so I figured I should catch you when you were in your least reclusive mood.”

“Ah.”  Robin understood pragmatism.  Zhe picked up the cards the astral rainicorn-dog had laid in front of zhir, reflexively shifting to zhir indoor size.  “So this is business, then?”

“Business and pleasure.  I want to start teaching you what you can do with your magic.  That’s business, but first I have to ask you a very important question.”

“What?”

She rearranged the cards in her hand, studying them intently for a good thirty seconds as the sounds of chirping insects and nocturnal monsters echoed in Robin’s mindscape.  “Do you have any twos?”

* * *

Macy awoke rested, refreshed, and only experiencing moderate levels of pain as sunlight poured through a window.  She nearly slid out of bed carelessly before she remembered about her leg. Groaning, she picked up the two walking sticks and hopped over to the window like a possessed tripod.  She threw the window fully open, leaning out and smelling the dank morning air. She could get used to this.

Another, more enticing smell met her nose.  Hopping on her crutches, she followed the smell through the main room to the brewing chamber at the back, where Razz was stirring a pot of something thick and lumpy while cackling madly.  Macy peered inside. The aroma of apples, raisins, and cinnamon became easier to parse; the fragrant bouquet enticed her to stick her hand in right then, but she decided against it.

“What’s this?” she asked, startling Razz into focus.  “Some sort of potion?”

The berry leaned her stirrer against the side of the cauldron and did a knee-bent head-tilt.  “It’s oatmeal.”

“Haha, need any lemon zest?”

“No, why would I—”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding!”  Macy pointed between herself and Razz.  “Just a little inside joke between you and me, ya know?”

“Macy, are you okay?”

She had to think about that question for a moment.  “Better than yesterday,” she decided. “That’ll do for now.”

“I meant, like, emotionally.”

“Nope!”  And then she spun around and walked out of the room.

Once back in the main room, Macy wasted no time in leaving it once again in favor of balcony, leading with her canes so that she wouldn’t experience a repeat of her previous excursion.  As she stepped out, a large grey bat with lobster-like claws glided toward the balcony from the trees. Macy watched, a rigid grin stuck on her face, as the bat latched onto the slight overhang of the roof before transforming into Huntress Wizard, swaddled in a brown cloak that she clearly had to hold to keep from falling in front of her face.

“How goes the morning hunt?” asked Macy, waving nervously.

“Good.”  HW leapt down from above, landing on all fours before slowly standing up.  “It wasn’t a hunt, though; I was surveying a patch of endangered alder bushes which only blooms in the morning.  They’ve been disappearing in alarming numbers lately; I suspect a displaced warren of varmints is to blame.”

“Glob darn varmints!” Macy exclaimed, snapping her fingers.  “I sure do hate whatever those are and wish they’d stop doing whatever they’re doing.”

“Oh, they burrow underground and, uh…”  HW stopped, her hand on the door. “Macy, are you okay?”

“Oh, definitely!  I’m certainly not mortally embarrassed about my repeated failures or anything.”

“That’s good,” called a voice from above as Robin slid off the roof into a pyramid-shaped pile.  Zhe gave Macy a knowing wink. “I’m glad there are no deep-seated emotional problems we need to work through whatsoever.”

“Good to know,” said Huntress Wizard, pushing the door open as she narrowed her eyes like it was not, in fact, good to know.  She cast off her cloak, which flew into the rafters, and cupped her hands to her mouth. “Hey Razz! How’s breakfast coming?”

“It is finished,” she said, walking out of the brewing chamber with a massive cauldron balanced on her head, arms outstretched to keep balance.  “One piping hot pot of my secret recipe.” She set it down on the large table in the middle of the room, then rushed into the kitchen and produced four ornate wooden bowls.

As she began doling out the oatmeal, Macy sat down in front of a bowl and began examining the carvings, tracing the twining of lines with her finger.  HW sat next to her, examining Macy’s examination. “You’re a fan of these bowls?” she asked.

“Uh-huh.”  For the moment, Macy’s anxieties were cleared from her mind, at least until she summoned them by noticing their absence.  “Yeppers.”

“I made them.”

Macy looked up at HW’s face, which now bore a big goofy grin beneath her obscured eyes.  She seemed like one of the younger kids at the orphanage, beaming as she showed off some arts-and-crafts project (in Macy’s mind she herself had never been “one of the younger kids”).  The juxtaposition brought a chuckle out of Macy. “That’s… oh, man, but that’s impressive.”

“That’s nothing,” said Robin.  “One time Macy made an origami wallet that could fold into a crane!  Only trouble was the crane kept escaping. If she had someone who could teach her how to commune with animals, maybe she could—”

“That’s enough, Robin.”  Macy held up a hand and shot her friend a harsh glare.  “Don’t do that right now.”

“Do what?” zhe asked in that tone of voice Macy found it impossible to interpret even after all these years.

“Nothing.  Never mind.”

Razz chose that moment to interrupt, getting everyone’s attention by clanking the side of the cauldron with her serving spoon.  “Alright, everyone, it’s feeding time! But before we dig in, I’d like to say how honored we both are to have two such wonderful guests.  It is a gift to be able to give hospitality, and I just want the both of you to know that your presence is very much appreciated. Now let’s dig into some oatmeal!”

While Macy fluttered her eyebrows coquettishly at the assurance, Robin raised zhir own.  “That’s it?”

“Um, we have some sausage as well, if you’d like it.”

“No, I mean, aren’t you going to offer a blessing for the food?  Kinda like what you did last night. It’s just that y’all seem pretty in touch with nature.”

Zhe nodded at HW, who had stuffed her mouth full to bursting with oatmeal.  Unable to even reply back, she instead gave a strange three-fingered hand gesture in acknowledgement.

“…the point is,” zhe continued, “back when I was in the Crystal Dimension, my family was much less religious, but we still prayed to Tourmaline before most meals.  Even Princess Cookie would usually say a token blessing to Glob. I figured a bunch of naturalists like y’all would do it more, not less.”

“That would be redundant,” explained Razz.  “Every moment of our lives is dedicated to the spirit of nature — not any specific entity, but nature as a whole, as well as those others who serve its balance.  Tokenizing that would feel tawdry in comparison.”

“Words is words,” simplified HW, finally having swallowed.

“Yes, precisely.  And you  _ do _ so have a way with them.”  Razz stroked her girlfriend’s arm with a gloved hand; Macy made a choking gesture, which might have been more effective had she been in possession of a neck.

“In a manner of speaking,” Robin added.  Everyone at the table gave a polite chuckle.

The rest of the breakfast conversation was similarly banal.  Afterwards, Macy volunteered to help clean clean up the dishes while Robin and HW went on midday forest patrol.  Razz was eager to accept this offer. The chipper berry asked Macy a variety of questions as the two scrubbed the dishes — what she had been doing before she came here, how the Duke of Nuts was these days, whether she was planning on changing out of her pajamas (although she was welcome to keep them, Razz had hastened to add).  Macy kept her responses short, energetic, and not at all reassuring.

Razz broke face first.  When she had put the last bowl on the drying rack, she turned to Macy, a mixture of worry and frustration replacing her sprightly expression.  “Are you quite alright? Because I can’t help but feel you’re not.”

“Oh, you know, I’m fine.  I’m totally fine!” A part of Macy’s mind knew that deliberately emulating an obviously in-denial character from a particularly cliché sitcom was probably not a good idea, but at this point she was committed to the bit.  “I’m fine. It’s fine. We’re all fine here. How are you?”

Razz took a long, deep breath before responding.  “My girlfriend can be… socially unaware. She’s not used to dealing with other people.  I’m sure you know what that kind of person can be like.”

“Yeah, because Robin’s a bigger social fool by a dozen leagues.”

“You weren’t supposed to say that out loud, dearie.”  Razz beckoned Macy to follow her into the main room, where she sat down on the couch.  “My point is that she’s afraid of getting close to people with whom she doesn’t already have common ground.  Robin she can approach on the level of a naturalist, but you’re a hero. A domestic hero.”

Macy sat down on the other side of the couch, where she had woken up yesterday afternoon.  “Wait, so you’re saying the reason she doesn’t want to take me on as an apprentice isn’t because I’ve donked up every five minutes, but because she’s  _ nervous?” _   She cracked a smile.  “That’s adorable!”

“Yes, she is.”  A beat. “I mean, uh, that’s a simplifaction, but yes.  With one exception, she’s never taught anyone who wasn’t already a capable huntress.”

Macy perked up.  “Who was the exception?”

Razz cursed under her breath.  “I shouldn’t have said anything!  Now you’ll get your hopes back up!  Listen, listen, my point is that you need to accept that my girlfriend’s priorities are—”

“Who.  Was. The.  Exception.”

The berry patted Macy’s forehead.  “Well, aren’t you just precious? You’re not getting any more than that out of me.”

The nut kept glowering at her, then decided to switch to a different tactic.  She put a finger to her lips and pouted, pinching her injured leg a tiny bit so that a tear of pain welled up in her eyes.

“…I shouldn’t tell you this, but alright.”  Razz sighed.  “The person whom Huntress Wizard trained didn’t ask for training themself, and they didn’t get in after proving themself.  They were in a position where they  _ needed _ training, because they had no place to return.”

“And I do.”  Macy leaned back, clanking her head against the arm of the couch in a manner that would have probably given anyone without her ridiculously thick skull a concussion.  “Ironic, isn’t it? If I had come out here a fortnight ago, I might have gotten in.” She turned to Razz. “Do you think it’s bad that I wonder what would have happened if I weren’t adopted, just so I could have gotten that training?  But in that case, I probably wouldn’t have even had the confidence to come out here in the first place. For all the good that did me.”

“It’s not bad at all.  We all wonder about possibilities that are far from wonderful.  What matters is what we choose to make real.”

“But what does it mean when we fail?”

Razz shrugged.  “You still made your choice.  If it doesn’t work out, that’s life.  You just need to accept that some things will be out of your control and it doesn’t reflect on your character.  It’s not easy, but it’s better than personally holding yourself accountable for every obstacle you encounter.”

“Huh.  Thanks, Razz.  You’re a real pal.”

“We just met yesterday, and I’m old enough to be your mother.”

“Yeah,” Macy agreed, “we’re quite the odd pair of fruit, ain’t we?”

* * *

As promised, later that day Huntress Wizard took Macy out to show her basic survival skills — in this case, how to identify dangerous plants.  Given the setting, there were plenty of dangerous plants around for Macy to identify. After half an hour of warnings, she was still unsure about how to identify  _ non _ -dangerous plants, but she hoped that section would come up eventually.

“…and this one is called ‘angel’s flugelhorn’,” the huntress explained, using a spindly twig to point to a blue-flowered weed.  “If you examine its roots, you’ll see that they have tiny red barbs on them, which it uses to overwhelm the common mycelium network and essentially mind-control the plants around it.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh.”  Squinting, Macy could just barely make out the miniscule specks HW was talking about.  “And how will this one kill me?”

“If you’re not talking to the CMN, it doesn’t pose a direct threat, but you don’t want to build your shelter near it.  It warps the roots of the plants around them to protect itself from burrowers, which can weaken the soil structure and lead to sinkholes.  That would be disastrous in your present condition.”

“Right.”  Macy took a step forward; one of her walking canes sunk deep into the ground like a golf ball into the final hole.  The ground in a half-meter diameter circle around it fell away, and it slipped out of her grasp. She had to quickly spin around as she fell in order to avoid banging her leg, letting go of the other cane in the process.  Huntress Wizard moved quickly, catching her before she hit the forest floor and handing her the cane she had dropped. Macy pushed herself up, poking the ground to make sure it was solid. “Like that,” she chuckled. “Hey, thanks for saving me.”

“There’s no need to thank me.”

“No, really.  Back with the sign, too.  And thanks for teaching me all this.  I know nature has been trying to have its way with me since I got out here, so you’re sort of defying it to protect me.  I just didn’t want you to think that went unnoticed.”

“Hm.”  HW stroked her chin as she bent down to pick up the cane from the sinkhole.  She turned and presented it to Macy, palm outstretched, cape fluttering in the soft breeze.  “Take it.”

Macy clasped the cane, twirling it in her hand before stomping it back on the ground.  “I guess I’d better be more careful next time, huh? Assuming there is a next time.”

“Why shouldn’t there be?”

She laughed, feeling out a path out of the thicket with her canes.  “Because this whole excursion was ill-advised. I don’t know anything about traversing the wilderness, and as much as I want to be like you, that’s just not who I am.”

“Yet.”

Macy whirled around, leaning backwards on her walking canes like a startled tripod.  “What do you mean, ‘yet’?”

“I was wrong about you, Macy.  Or rather, I  _ became _ wrong about you.”  The wind picked up, blowing the hood of her cloak back to reveal the shock of leafy hair that framed her passionate, catlike eyes.  “You fully dedicate yourself to every task you take upon yourself, succeed or fail. There is no halfway with you. When given the choice, you opted to immerse yourself in our lifestyle, and in doing so you invited the huntress spirit to reside within you.”

Macy hopped backwards so she could stand fully upright once more.  Her trembling hands threatened to let go of her canes, so she clenched them tight; they went bone-white.  “Does that mean—”

“Yes.”  The sounds of the forest animals around them went quiet once more, the whole world paying rapt attention to the next words out of HW’s mouth.  “If you are so willing, then I, Huntress Wizard, shall take you on as my apprentice.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, Razz has nothing to do with Madame Razz from She-Ra. She's just a witchy, berry-centric brewer who lives in the middle of the woods and provides our hero sage advice and — no, seriously, there's no connection. I came up with her name and concept before I got into that show, okay? I swear. I mean, you've seen my writing style. If she were a reference she'd be _way_ more overt.
> 
> Huntress Wizard is a difficult character to write, and if I'm being honest, I'm not totally happy with how she's written this chapter. I think a lot of that is unavoidable, though. Her strength as a character comes from the way she exhibits her core competency and the often silly way that manifests, and the chapter premise doesn't really allow her to shine in that regard. The scrapped scene I mentioned probably would have helped with that, but overall it would have interrupted the pacing, and anyway this isn't really Huntress Wizard's story — for this 8-chapter run, specifically, it's very much Macy's. I will say that if you're a Huntress Wizard fan you'll probably be very glad at the next few chapters, which let more of her Huntress-Wizardiness shine through.
> 
> I'm not sure what it is exactly, but something about Huntress Wizard and Finn's relationship in Season 9 (or Season 10, depending on who you ask) led me to think, “polyamory”. So far this is actually the biggest change I've done to any established relationship. Bonnie & Marcy, Phoebe & Cinnbun, Jake & Lady — I didn't mess with any of those relationships at all. That's not because of some devotion to the status quo; in all of those cases, I just had more ideas for what to do with that established relationship than without. Finn & HW is a bit of a grey area, because while I like their dynamic together I also want to explore HW as her own character separate from Finn. I don't want to think of polyamory as a compromise, but from a narrative perspective this specific example kind of is.
> 
> The more astute among you might notice that, with the introduction of Razz (and to a lesser extent the Lumpy Ambassador), the list of chapters which have not introduced a new character remains steadily at zero. I really, really wish I could say that trend was slowing down, but remember, this is an epic planned to have 1-4 million words. There are major characters who have barely gotten a mention yet, if that. Rest assured, there is a reason for all this; no inclusion is random, and the order in which things occur is just as measured as anything else. You don't need to kept a running list of all the characters who've been introduced. When they become relevant again, I'll include sufficient heads-up.
> 
> The end of this chapter is one of those things I've been building toward for a long time. Macy finally has a real mentor figure! Not only that, she has direction, which means she can start actively taking steps to become a hero. Or an adventurer. It's not an accident that I use both those words, by the way, but that's probably a conversation for later down the line. At any rate, I'm just glad I can finally gush about Huntress Wizard, now that it's clear what role she'll play.
> 
> God, I love Huntress Wizard. She's just so cool and wise and yet also just as much of a dork as everyone else. She loves nature and Finn and elk hearts and she's also really scary and brutal because she's not an environmentalist, she's a _huntress,_ and that means she hunts. There's nothing in the show that I'm basing my decision to make her a goblin on; I'm just doing that.
> 
> And now, the ~~weather~~ preview:  
> Macy’s next words came out in a stuttering gasp. “T-true f-f-facts?”


	9. Natural Harmonies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Huntress Wizard starts training Macy, but they run into roadblocks when Macy starts acting her age.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the late upload. NaNoWriMo, you know how it is.
> 
> …
> 
> Yeah, that's all I've got. [Here's the bonus chapter](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21404101), a super-short, super-stylized folk-tale-like story about everyone's favorite huntress what also is a wizard. (No, it's not short because this is late, I wrote this before I wrote Chapter 9 and that was months in advance.)

Macy was on the prowl.  She stepped quickly and lightly across the forest floor, to the extent her injury permitted.  With one leg in a cast, she was now forced to rely on a pair of walking canes to navigate; she took care to only step them in remnant patches of mud, wet enough to be quiet, dry enough to be firm.  She sidestepped a patch of yellow flowers up ahead.  _ Don’t want to touch those petals. _

Nearby, a nearby bush rustled.  Macy stepped into the shadow of a large tree and stood perfectly still, sticking out a cane which had been in the air to imitate a branch.  Keeping it perfectly still was a struggle, but she couldn’t simply lower it because… Keeping it perfectly still was a struggle. The rustling continued, and she could make out a spot of brown fur through the leaves.  Then whatever it was scurried off and the nut allowed herself to breathe again.

Macy scanned the ground, attempting to pick out the trail she had been following.  Although the recent rain had refreshed the forest floor, there had already appeared a complex jumble of impressions in the still-wet grass which confused each individual pattern into one chaotic mosaic.  Using the raised cane as a guide, she traced the path she had been following, hoping to clarify the path once more. Soon it calcified in her vision; once she fixed on it, the mess of visual data became infinitely easier to parse.  Wasting no time, she resumed.

Picking her way through a bramble thicket, Macy soon found herself at the edge of a small clearing, where she spotted her quarry staking out some prey of its own.  The large blue cougar — one-headed, she noted — had left little of its distinctive icy growth in the tracks behind it, but where it now crouched crystals were forming at its paws and on its forehead.  It lay atop a small mount with a hole in the side, probably home to some terrifying killer rabbit. Its tail twitched slowly, repelling horseflies the size of mosquitoes and mosquitoes the size of horseradishes.  A trickle of dirt alerted both Macy and the cool cat to some motion inside the burrow; both tensed, Macy clenching her hand as the cat unsheathed its claws.

A tuft of kenspeckled hide appeared, the gunshot to start the proverbial sprint.  The cougar flexed its haunches and sprung toward the entrance as its leporine inhabitant emerged, a lightning-fast motion that seemed smooth and slow as molasses.  Her mind in a focused fugue, Macy arced her arm and flicked her wrist, releasing a tiny stone clasped within. It sailed toward the cat even as the cat sailed through the air, impacting its nose with a sickening squelch.  With a mighty “mrow!” the frigid feline darted off into the thick of the woods once more as the rabbit emerged fully.

Macy stepped into the clearing, a smug grin on her face.  “That should take care of your pest problem for a while. Those pesky pumas’ll know better than to cross anyone under the supervision of Eagle-Eyed Macy.”

“No, no, no,” said the rabbit as she stood on her hind legs and began growing.  “That was a good shot, but the attitude’s all wrong.”

“I thought you said to be unfaltering and unfiltered,” Macy whined.  “That I needed to ‘let go of normals’ or whatever and learn the laws of the animal kingdom.”

“That’s not all I said.”  The form before her was definitely no longer leporine; it was a boundaryless shape halfway between human, animal, and plasma, its voice coming from every part of its being at once.  “I also cautioned you about the true nature of the hunt.”

“I didn’t quite get that part,” she admitted.  “There’s only so much of ‘embrace simplicity while rejecting savagery’ I can incorporate into the art of tracking large, one-headed cats.”

The being completed its transformation into Huntress Wizard, eyes scowled, arms crossed.  “I meant that you’re not supposed to be competing with anyone but yourself. Now let’s run it again, but this time pretend you’re not cityfolk and don’t act like a trophy hunter gloating about her latest catch.”

“How about let’s  _ not _ run it again,” countered Robin as zhe entered the clearing, zhir color scheme infested with patches of light blue.  “Full-body illusions like that are tiring, and keeping my tail waxed down like that can’t be good. We’ll just say that’s something to work on for tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Macy agreed.  “I mean, it’d be pretty unrealistic to expect me to have picked all this up by the end of my first day as your apprentice.”

“I suppose,” conceded HW.  She looked up at the sky. “Besides, it’s almost time for dinner.  Tag along and I’ll show you what a  _ real _ hunt looks like.”

Macy followed Huntress Wizard as she darted through the forest; She nearly lost track of the agile goblin several times, always finding her waiting impatiently behind the next tree.  Coming off the rush of the practice exercise, Macy realized how much of it had been artificial. She had managed to lose herself in the moment, truly imagining herself to be an expert tracker, but now she had a hard enough time following someone who  _ wanted _ to be pursued — and not just because of her injury.  She hadn’t the faintest idea what trail the huntress herself was following, if indeed there was one at all.

After what felt like hours but couldn’t have been longer than five minutes, HW gestured for Macy to stop.  In front of them, drinking from a stagnant puddle formed from a slight recess in the forest floor, was a large, white-winged possum.  Its spike-tipped tail curled around its body as its whiplike tongue lapped at the rancid water. No, it wasn’t the water that interested the avian marsupial; as she observed, Macy realized that it was actually feasting on bugs which skirted across the puddle’s surface.  The insects darted to and fro, dancers in some moribund vaudeville routine, the possum’s tongue serving as the comically-oversized cane to drag them offstage as residual droplets plunked accompaniment in the revue’s proverbial pit.

Then Huntress Wizard loosed a hatchet, which sunk into the possum’s neck, cutting through its flesh like a hunting implement through an elaborately-constructed fantasy scenario.

* * *

The four of them — Macy, Robin, HW, and Razz — took advantage of the nicer weather that evening to set up a campfire about a quarter-kilometer from the treehouse.  While HW fiddled with magical warding stones to keep away nosy creatures and Robin picked burrs out of zhir tail, Razz demonstrated to Macy the best method for spit-roasting a possum.

“The key is consistent rotations,” the berry was explaining as she guided Macy’s hands.  “That means it’s important to set the right pace. Too fast and you’ll wear yourself out; too slow and you’ll find it quite difficult to keep the speed anywhere near constant.”

“Uh-huh.”  Macy slowly rotated the handle of the spit, then nearly lost her grip on it when gravity began taking over.  She recoiled as droplets of meat juice scattered in all directions.

“Oh, don’t be such a chipmunk,” Razz chastised.  “It’s dead; it won’t bite.”

“Yeah, heh heh.”  Macy turned her attention back to the possum.  If she unfocused her eyes and concentrated on the weight of the rotating lever, she could pretend it wasn’t there.  She imagined herself cranking the handle of an artisanal spooker’s-cube; the sizzle of flesh was but a strange melody coming from the toy’s clockwork.  When she finished winding up the gears, a hot meal would pop out, and she wouldn’t have to think about what that meal was.

“…better than I was at your age,” Razz was saying.  “Of course, that’s because I didn’t even start living this life until I was much older, but still.”

“What?” Macy asked.

“I’m saying you’re doing a good job, kid.  Especially considering your injury.”

“I’m not a— thanks.”  She ignored the creeping soreness in her nut joints.  “I mean, my arms weren’t what got broken anyway. Besides, don’t they say that when you lose one sense, your other senses heighten?”

“I’m pretty sure that doesn’t apply to getting a broken leg.  At the very least, not after a day and a half.”

“I don’t rightly know either way.”  She stopped for a moment to consider the proposition.  “Well, I think I read in a medical journal that the effect is caused by the brain repurposing the now-useless processing centers related to what was lost, so I guess that wouldn’t have any effect unless I lost my leg completely.”

“You read a medical journal?”

“Yeah, for a school project.”  _ About your girlfriend’s boyfriend. _

Razz smirked.  “I didn’t know you were a nerd.”

“I’m not a nerd!” Macy lied.  She tried to stop her foot but was fortunately prevented by the cast.  “And I’m not a kid, either. I’m a grown-up jock. A grock. Wait, no, that’s—”

“Keep turning!” shouted Razz, pushing down the handle and then swatting at the possum with her gloved hands.  Macy pivoted to look at it and saw, to her great embarrassment, that it was smoldering.

“Heh, whoops,” she said, laughing nervously as a heat hotter than the fire before her rose to her nut cheeks.  “I guess you should probably take over.”

“No, no, no,” Razz assured her, throwing her gloves into the fire and withdrawing a new, identical pair from a holster attached to one leg.  “You just need practice, and you’ll never get practice if you never practice.”

“I can’t say that isn’t unfalse,” Macy conceded.

She turned the spit more slowly, more sustainably, this time; instead of a spooker’s-cube, she imagined the persistent second-hand of a clock, that thin red line which separates the future from the past.  Macy had always admired clocks, not the least for their steadfastness and regularity — that persistent chase of the ever-moving present for which the steadfast hands served as both markers and ushers, the endless cycle whose duration was always known even as the future it counted toward was evermore mysterious, those gears and springs arranged with the utmost precision by the most skilled of engineers in a system so utilitarian it achieved a mechanical kind of beauty that nothing organic could replicate.  A clock would tire, sure, but it could be rewound. While many of the other orphans had preferred digital clocks, being easier to read, Macy always enjoyed watching the second-hand tick by, synchronizing the motion of space and time through its calibrated uniformity, erasing the false barrier between these two aspects of reality and in so doing achieving a harmonious union with itself.

One and a half turns of the theoretical hour hand later, Macy was pulled out of her temporal reverie by a paw placed on her shoulder.  “Smells done,” Robin said directly into her ear slit.

“Whoa!”  Macy let go of the spit and fell directly onto her nut rear.  “Glob, man, don’t startle me like that.”

“Oops.”

“Zhe’s quite right, though,” said Razz, lifting up the spit and examining the roasted meat.  “Not bad at all. The critter could probably go a bit longer, but the night isn’t getting any younger and I’d imagine your arms could use a rest after that.”

Macy tried to prop herself up with her walking sticks, but Razz was right; instead, she just gave the berry a thumbs-up and turned to Robin.  “Hey, could you give me a lift?”

As the rainicorn-dog stretched Macy upright from behind, Huntress Wizard approached a tree toward the middle of the campsite and, with three great strikes of a stone-bladed axe, chopped it down.  Razz set the possum on the improbably-smooth trunk while HW chopped up the body into simple seats, arranging them around the stump. When that was finished, she placed a hand on top of the possum; seeing Razz do so as well, Macy and Robin decided to follow suit as Huntress Wizard began to pray.

“Spirits of the wilderness,” she intoned, “we thank you for this gift.  We thank the spirit of the possum for its participation in the great game of life and death; we thank the spirit of the fire for lending its warmth; we thank the spirit of the forest for providing all this bounty and more.  We thank the balance of nature, the balance which has allowed all of this, and in exchange for this nourishment, we pledge ourselves anew to maintaining it. All this we do according to the laws which are beyond laws. Amen.”

“Amen,” echoed Razz.  “Amen!” shouted Macy a second later.

“See, that’s what I was talking about last night,” said Robin as HW began to carve into the possum with her hatchet.  “Why didn’t you do this then?”

“Hunnybuns usually gives her thanks during the hunt,” Razz explained.  “I think it feels more natural to do it outside. The treehouse is as close to nature as you can get while still being fully sheltered from the elements, but to someone like her it still feels artificial.  Also, heck deer are an invasive species, so they have a different, more… aggressive blessing.”

“Invashive shpesh’z?” mumbled Macy, her mouth muffled from masticating a morsel of meat.

“Yes, there’s been a bit of an epidemic of those lately.  It’s part of why we decided to settle here, and why it’s so important that we take an active role in maintaining the balance of the local ecosystem.”

“So you’re like nature cops,” suggested Robin.  “Keepin’ the peace, investigatin’ nature crimes, that sorta biz.”

“Not cops,” HW insisted, glaring at Robin.  “Rangers.”

Epiphany struck Macy like a mild breeze; she gently slammed her fists on the stump table.  “So that’s why the disappearing plants counting you were!” A beat. “I mean—”

“Mhm.”  The brown-cloaked goblin nodded her head as if there were nothing odd about what Macy had said.  She swallowed a bite of possum. “Generally such mass influxes of non-native species are caused by a forced migration as a result of habitat loss, but no such incident in the past twenty years has been large enough to explain this on its own.  By analyzing the exact lists of species affected and the way they’re responding, I’m hoping to discover the underlying cause of this imbalance and, if it’s possible, rectify it.”

“Mathematical!  I’m great at solving mysteries.  In fact, mathematically speaking, I’ve solved one hundred percent of the mysteries I’ve ever attempted to solve.  True facts.”

“Um,” Robin piped up, “I don’t think it’s fair to say that you really solved—”

“True.  Facts.”

“In that case,” continued HW, “as my apprentice you will have the opportunity to put those talents to use.  But before you can uphold the law of the wild, you must first learn to embody it. That will be your first task tomorrow.  Are you prepared?”

“Uh-huh,” said Macy, who had truthfully been lost in a daydream since the word ‘apprentice.’

* * *

“It’s tomorrow,” Huntress Wizard whispered in Macy’s ear slit in the dead of night.

The nut was swaddled in a blanket of lichen under a canopy of stars, three meters away from the extinguished ashes of last night’s campfire.  She shifted to cover herself more fully in the woven moss, ignoring the moist mulchy texture that was viscerally upsetting yet strangely inviting.  She couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or closed.

HW prodded her pupa-like protegé once more.  “Macadamia!” she whispered, more harshly this time.  “Get up! Awaken! Arise! Perambulate! Energize! Leaven!”

“…go away, Robin,” mumbled Macy.  “I don’t wanna go firefly-catching again.  You always cheat.”

“No, it’s me,” Huntress Wizard hissed.  “Come on, it’s tomorrow.”

“Wha—”  Macy’s eyes finally adjusted to the faint starlight, reminding her of where she was.  “Oh.” She pawed around the frost-bitten ground for her walking sticks and propped herself up.

As she left the meager warmth of the lichen blanket, her broken leg suddenly ached as if it had run a thousand marathons without her, and as she stood up a wave of vertigo hit her.  Razz had told her to expect these kinds of things. Apparently, they meant the healing potion was working. Eventually, she knew, that would be worth it. Eventually.

“So, what are we doing?”  Macy’s voice had the quality of a creaking floorboard in a haunted mansion if the floorboard itself were also haunted and all the ghosts had sore throats.

HW simply said, “Watch this,” and leapt into the darkness with a whooshing of perturbed grass.

“Watch what?” Macy asked, exasperated.  “I can’t see a thing!”

“That’s the thing.”  Her mentor’s voice bounced and mingled with the canopy above, making it difficult to discern direction.  “You will need to pinpoint my location without assistance from any devices.”

“Why?  How?” But she received no response.

Macy could hear the goblin darting among the branches above, but she couldn’t tell where it was coming from due to the general rustle spurred on by a steady, biting breeze.  Looking up, she could see shapes moving as they occluded what probably would have been the richest canvas of stars she had ever seen; as for whether any of those shapes were her quarry, she was totally clueless.

If sight and sound had failed her, perhaps smell could help.  She took several deep breaths to clear her nut sinuses and sniffed.  The crisp night air was a veritable tapestry of scents. The odors of the forest, of sap and manure, were by now familiar to her.  The petrichor of the other day’s rain had faded, replaced by a gentler, more enticing aroma she could only think of as “plant-breath” — a vitalizing bouquet of subtle scents, now spiked with night-blooming flowers.  The direction of the wind was wrong to smell smoke, yet apparently it hadn’t always been, for the breeze nevertheless carried a tinge of it.

For all that, Macy was no closer to locating Huntress Wizard.  “Glob on a stick!” she exclaimed, frizz-frazzled. “I’m going to repeat myself:   _ How?” _

“You lack the senses to detect me,” came HW’s voice, seeming to echo from within Macy’s shell.  “Yet you try anyway.”

“Yeah, of course I — wait.  Am I supposed to give up?”

“What happens to a wild animal when it gives up?”

Macy chose not to answer that.

“Then you must find another way.”

Macy percolated on this for a while, soaking in the sounds and smells of the forest as she stood like a four-legged tripod with her walking sticks.  The advice was at once obvious and infuriating. The simplest solution would probably have been to locate the huntress using sound, but Macy’s ear slits weren’t good enough for that.  With her own sensory suite disqualified, of course she would need to rely on something else, but what? Surely not  _ Robin’s _ sensory suite; zhe and Razz were still asleep, and Macy doubted the solution would be to wake them.  She suddenly felt very alone. It was a uniquely disquieting feeling, to be alone while surrounded by friends.

Well, surrounded by friends and by the denizens of a place literally called the Evil Forest.  Perhaps it was not so strange to feel lonely. Although if she were to become a defender of nature, then should should attempt to blur the line between “friends” and “denizens of the forest”.  She heard the hooting and chirping of nocturnal birds, the buzzing and scuttling of curious insects, the stomping and rustling of grounded animals; she imagined all of this as chatter from her five million closest companions.  They would get together and talk about whatever it is normal people talk about — probably sports fashion, based on her 21st-century sitcoms. She wondered what sort of sports a forest creature would engage in. Probably something violent, like poker.

Their conversation would be interrupted by birdsong.  As it was spring, the forest would be filled with young magpies and pigeons and sparrow-hawks, eager to test out their voices.  Each would have a different song. Through the discord, a sort of accidental harmony would emerge; Macy found herself tapping her good foot along with the imagined music.  Nearby, a particularly brave robin would sing louder than the others, its song a jazzy concerto of passion. Then a fox would eat it. A shame; Macy would have liked the song.

She found herself continuing it in the bird’s stead, humming her own improvised verse to fill the dead air.  Her voice was no longer raspy. Hearing the sound echo off the trees and back into her own ears did not bring her out of her reverie so much as it united the two worlds — she heard the nightsong of the owls and crows and could picture them as clearly as if it were day.  Knowing the shape of the forest, she could place even the tiniest detail.

The sudden shock of inexplicable sensory feedback was too much for her; she fell over backwards as if punched in the gut by the concept of oneness, landing on her nut bottom with her walking sticks still gripped tightly in her hands.  Still, that brief glimpse had been sufficient. She picked up the walking stick in her left hand and pointed toward an occlusion on the right side of the canopy. “There,” she announced.

“Very good.”  HW jumped down from the canopy and snapped her fingers, summoning a small swarm of fireflies to light up the campsite.  In the soft glow of their periodic bioluminescence, the huntress seemed younger, as if decades of living in the wilderness with precious few sources of contact with other people hadn’t weathered her spirit.  “Do you understand what just happened?”

“Yes.”  A beat.  “No.”

Huntress Wizard raised one hand, finger outstretched, and a fireflight landed on her knuckle.  “In the wilderness, all boundaries are blurred. To live is to invite death; to hunt is to be hunted.  Every living thing is a part of a larger ecosystem, one no less worthy of being considered alive than its components.”  The firefly flew away; HW clasped her hands behind her back and watched it leave. “When I speak of the balance of nature, I’m not simply referring to an abstraction.  When an ecosystem is disturbed, all creatures within it eventually suffer. Such a disturbance is like an illness in a vast organism, and I — along with others like myself — act as one of whatever it is that attacks illnesses in an organism.”

“An antibody?” Macy suggested, trying to count the fireflies.  They kept blinking in and out, a visual mating call that she was sure was very sexy to fireflies, making it hard to determine whether she had double-counted them.

“No, not an antibody.  Bodies are important; a body itself is an ecosystem.  I’m very pro-body.”

“Right.”  Macy pushed herself up onto her foot.  “So how do I become a better pro-body?”

“You already know the answer to that.  This time, I’ll actually hide.”

* * *

By the time sunlight shone through the leaves above, Macy’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness.  She scanned the edge of the campsite, searching for any disturbance or irregularity which would give away her mentor’s position.  She only had one hand on a walking stick now; the other clutched the Root Sword as she parted a bramble bush to examine the ground beneath.  No disturbances large enough to belong to HW. Still, she kept an eye on the bush as she backed toward the ashes of last night’s campfire..

She heard a twig snap behind her and whirled on her good leg; she had to slam her walking stick into the ground to prevent her bad leg from hitting the dirt and potentially reversing its accelerated progress.  By now half the campsite was pock-marked like a chocolate chip cookie with all his chocolate chips removed. Razz hadn’t given her a firm estimate on how long the leg would take to heal with the aid of the potions, but the berry had been quite extremely adamant about not worsening it.

She locked her eyes on the source of the disturbance and sighed.  Robin had turned over in zhir sleep again, crushing a twig that had gotten tangled up in her tail.  The humidity had caused some of zhir buttons to fall out, and whenever that happened, her tail got messy.  Once, a magpie had built a nest in it. When the mama never showed up, Princeso had insisted on raising the chicks up himself.  Macy had attempted to follow suit by hatching a box of chocolate eggs, which went predictably poorly. After rounding up the last of the chocolate chickens, Princeso had Princess Bubblegum take them away to the chocolate aviary and send the original chicks up to a nice farm upkingdom.  It was a shame he’d never responded to any of Macy’s numerous requests to go visit them. She’d have to ask about that again some time.

Macy walked over to her friend and rubbed zhir belly; zhir hind leg lifted up in zhir sleep and began scratching zhir ear.  “You’re a piece of work, ain’t you?” she asked with a smirk. She sat down and began pulling leaves and debris out of zhir tail, using her sword to preen the tangled hairs.  Barbers used sharp things, and swords were sharp, so this was definitely a good idea. “Sometimes it feels like I need to take care of you as much as you take care of me. What’ll you do with yourself when I don’t need looking after, huh?”

Then she spotted a rustling of leaves in the reflection of her sword.  She spun and rose at the same time, her sword singing as it corkscrewed.  It was only the wind, of course; it whistled as it blew past her ear slits.  That wasn’t what she had noticed.

She pointed the Root Sword at the bush she had examined earlier, which wasn’t rustling as much as the others.  “There,” she announced. “Either I’m getting good or you’re getting sloppy.”

A squirrel crawled out from under the boosh, holding a nut in its mouth.  It looked up at Macy briefly before resuming its nibbling.

Macy lowered her sword and rolled her eyes.  “Glob dang it, that’s the fifth time! We really need to find a more private place to do this.”

“Macadamia,” said the squirrel, “your best friend is a shapeshifter.  You can’t  _ possibly _ fall for this.”  Its form glowed and increased in size until HW was standing there, an acorn in her hand.  She popped the nut into her mouth and chomped down with an overloud cracking sound.

“I was supposed to be looking for  _ you _ , so I kept an eye out for  _ you _ .”

“I’m not the only animal you’ll need to track.”

“Well, you could have explained that at the start!”

“Probably.”  She spat out the acorn, then picked up Macy’s other walking stick and tossed it to her.  “Catch.”

She did, sheathing her sword quickly to free up the hand.   “Can I wake them up?”

“Go ahead.”

Grinning, Macy leaned over Robin’s ear, stabilizing herself across her body in a decent imitation of an arch bridge.  As she stabilized herself, she made careful not to so much as rustle Robin’s fur with her breath. She lowered herself further, paused, and inhaled.

Then she let out a singsong shout.  “Gooooooooood morning, dog!” She shoved herself back upright, wobbling on one foot before planting her stilts back down.  “Good morning, berry! I hope you’re feeling quite extraordinary!”

“What time is it?” asked Razz, continuing the song.

“Time for an adventure!” Macy responded without missing a beat.

“What’s with the singing?” complained Robin.  “Are you guys crazy?”

Macy, Razz, and Huntress Wizard looked at Robin, then sang out in unison:  “Very!”

“No, seriously, did y’all plan this just to yank my whiskers?”

“I did,” confessed Macy.  “These guys are just awesome enough to play along.”

“How did you all know to say that last line at the same time?”

Razz raised an eyebrow as she doffed her leaf blanket.  “The line was ‘very’; it wasn’t difficult to decipher from context.”

“Well, pardon me, but I’ve just had a really weird dream.  The Cosmic Owl was in it, too, so it’s probably a premonition dream.  I was picking some crabapples underwater when—”

“That will have to wait,” said Huntress Wizard.  “The sun has risen; we must break camp. My warding stones will be less effective in the light.”

* * *

Robin had not waited long, regaling the story of zhir dream for the duration of the trip back to the treehouse.  Frequently zhe lost her train of thought, distracted by a movement in the bushes, before resuming the tale from the very beginning.  By the time they reached the clearing, Macy was intimately familiar with the manner in which Robin had played zhir ukulele so fiercely that an entire forest of spaceships launched simultaneously.

“…and then I looked up at the sky, and I saw my great-grunkle Germaine painting the constellations on the inside of an enormous igloo,” zhe said for the sixth time.  “Except instead a’ stars, the constellations were made up of fireflies!”

“That’s nice, Robin,” said Razz nervously as she carried a trundle of leftover bones.  She leaned over to whisper in Macy’s ear slit. “Make it stop!”

“We deserve this,” Macy whispered back.

“We’re here,” announced HW with a matter-of-factness that barely concealed her relief.  She took the pinecone clasp off her cloak, which unfurled like leathery wings.  _ “Ennek az éneknek nincs jelentősége!” _ she chanted before taking flight.

“When do you suppose she’ll teach me to do that?” asked Macy.

“When you spend years manifesting your inner turmoil and imbuing it into a suitable accessory, thus allowing you to alter its fundamental nature through sheer willpower,” answered Razz.

“Ah.”

The platform came down, Huntress Wizard in tow; she had reattached her clasp.  As she stepped off, she gestured to Macy. “Follow me,” she said; “I’ll take you to the real rabbit warrens so you can practice moving stealthily.  Just don’t approach them, get in their way, or offend their taste in music.”

“Ma’am, I’m friends with Robin, and zhe unironically listens to electro-country bebop.  You don’t need to worry about that.“

“Good.  Robin, you can keep describing your dream to Razz.”

Razz collapsed onto her knees in the middle of the elevator.  Wordlessly, she pulled the lever to raise it, as Robin said, “So there I was, picking crabapples on the bottom of the ocean…”

* * *

Macy slathered another line of mud across her nut arm.  The color was almost the same, but she needed to keep her smell masked.  She couldn’t actually tell the difference, but she took her mentor at her word that the rabbits could.  Lacking a sensory suite as powerful as her prey made it difficult to judge how well she was doing. If the rabbit sniffed the air and immediately teleported away in a burst of confetti like the last twelve, then she would know she had done it wrong. 

Smell was not the only sense in which the rabbits held a distinct advantage.  She had to be extra careful where to place her walking sticks; now that the ground was dry, everything was louder, as if a flame spirit had passed by and turned up the volume on the universe.  Having one leg in a cast didn’t help one iota. As she picked up a walking stick in her mud-caked hand, she had to remind herself to steady her breathing, focusing and controlling it so as to steady her nerves and calm her nut heart.  This was it — her last opportunity until the next one.

The brown-and-white bunny stood on its hind legs, twitching its nose.  However much it smelled, Macy must not have been high enough on that list to warrant concern.  It edged closer to the patch of wild rhubarbs which lay between them. Its pawsteps were trepidatious, but that was just the way of things here.  It flicked its ears back and forth, scanning for sounds, as it approached the untamed, red-stemmed leaves. Its movements were erratic, as if trying to confuse a predator following from behind.  Macy took this as confirmation that it feared nothing from in front.

When it reached the rhubarbs, it took out a small radio and tuned it to a classics channel.  The rap duo ∏-FLAVR was playing; the rabbit thumped its foot as it began carefully tugging a rhubarb out of the ground.  The rhythmic pounding seemed to help it time its tugs. Over the radio, Flame King Phoebe and a robot named NEPTR were rapping about walking into shadows.

The huntress-in-training pulled her attention back toward the rabbit.  The top of the rhubarb was visible now. It gave another tug, sending loose dirt tumbling as a visible bulge appeared.  Phoebe and NEPTR shifted into a melodic duet with three-part harmony. No, she had to focus. She locked her eyes on the rabbit.  It checked the leaf to make sure it wasn’t ripping, then adjusted the volume on the radio.

_ “Augh!” _ shouted Macy, jumping out from the tree she had been hiding behind.  She slipped and fell onto the rhubarbs, dropping her walking sticks in the process.  Scrambling, she rolled over to the radio and pressed buttons until it stopped playing music.   _ “I can’t take it any more! _   ∏-FLAVR makes by far the worst raps of all time!”

This comment betrayed Macy’s biases, I’m afraid.  I don’t mean to suddenly break my veneer of impartiality several chapters before I was supposed to reveal my existence, but if I let this statement go unchallenged, it would simply be abhorrent.  As once who once held a passion for music myself, I must stress that, while many of ∏-FLAVR’s contemporary works had often lacked a certain level of finesse, that was mostly due to studio interference and executive meddling, and some of their earlier hits were regarded as masterpieces.  Macy would find this out herself in due time, but entirely too late for my tastes.

I apologize, I’ll resume the story.  You can pretend I never said this, if you wish.  When I reveal myself later, try and act surprised.

“Hey, watch your mouth, scrub!”  The rabbit had extracted a rhubarb and was now holding it like a club.  “Around’ is one of the classics of this generation, mark my words.”

“It’s stupid!  ‘Roll around your mind / Tell me what I’ll find’?  What the Glob does that even  _ mean?” _

“It’s not about what it means, you bur, it’s about how it feels.”

“It feels  _ stupid!” _

Macy knew she shouldn’t have said that before she opened her mouth — before she leapt out from behind the tree — but by then it was far too late for her to stop herself.  The rabbit hissed and unhinged its jaw, revealing fangs longer than its entire body in front of a glowing orange throat. With a metallic gurgle it spat out a wad of umber fluid which impacted next to her injured leg, instantly wilting a rhubarb and singing the edge of her cast with an acidic hiss.  As it charged up another ball, Macy cringed and covered her face with her arms, prepared to face the end.

A sudden breeze picked up the second projectile and sent it back toward the rabbit.  It laughed. “You really think you can—”

A familiar hatchet landed in the back of its neck before HW jumped down from the tree.  She looked at Macy, shaking her head and making a clucking sound with her tongue as she picked up the rabbit.  “Not good, Macy.”

“Hey, at least I hid myself just fine!  Trust me, maintaining that was  _ not _ worth listening to the rest of ‘Around’.  There are other rabbits to stalk.”

“That attitude is precisely the problem.”  The huntress picked up the rhubarb with her other hand and nudged it back into the ground.  “You’re still not taking the hunt as seriously as you should. I would have hoped connecting with all life in the forest would have given you that perspective.”

“Hmph.”  Macy rolled over to her walking sticks and propped herself upright.  She held out her injured leg. “How much longer do I need to wear this, anyway?”

HW walked over and put her hand on the cast, which glowed green for a brief moment.  Macy felt a tickling sensation on the inside of her nut muscles. “Two more days as the grass grows,” she guessed.  “Your body’s reacting well to the potion, and your growing connection to the manifestation of all life as expressed by you is probably helping.”

“Algebraic.  What’s next on our huntress training agenda, then?  Arrow fletching? Mongoose bribery? Necrotaxidermy?”

“Tea break.”

“Tea break?”

* * *

“Tea break!”

Razz was holding a large pot of ceramic kettle decorated with intricate gold patterns.  She traced the small table around which the other three were seated, pouring into each of their bark cups a dark, fragrant tea; Robin stretched zhir paw out and placed a tiny hibiscus flower in each filled cup.  Macy took a deep, enriching sniff, allowing the scents of calm domesticity to flush the odors of the forest from her nostrils. She picked up the cup and tipped it slightly, taking in only a tiny bit of the tea a ta time.  Warmth pulsed through her. She needed this.

“So, how’s the training going?” asked Robin, zhir teacup already empty and zhir flower nowhere to be seen.

“It’s going,” answered Huntress Wizard stiffly.  A beat. “Swiftly, that is. Macy is quite the adept learner, at least when it comes to the technical aspects.”

“Well,” said Razz, placing a placating hand on her girlfriend’s arm, “that sounds lovely.”

HW looked like she was going to say something else, but then she noticed Razz’s gesture and decided to change the subject.  “So, Robin, did you finish telling your dream story?”

“Yep.”

Macy waited several moments for zhir to continue talking, to no avail.  “And?”

“Oh yeah, the premonition.  Once I got through it for the eighty-fifth time, Razz told me that Cosmic Owl dreams are usually a lot shorter than that, since obviously the Cosmic Owl doesn’t have all night to go wandering through the dreamscape.  An’ since I remember the dream being so long, it most likely wasn’t actually the Cosmic Owl in my dream, so we should probably just ignore it.”

Razz raised an eyebrow.  “I’ve been meaning to ask you — how did you remember that dream with such perfect clarity, anyway?”

Robin shrugged.  “I took good notes, I guess.”

“Notes?  What on Ooo does that mean?”

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t have made up a Cosmic Owl.”

“I — but you — oh, never mind.”

“What about you?” said Robin, turning to face Huntress Wizard, who was calmly sipping her tea with two hands in a futile attempt to hide her chortling.  “Have you ever had a Cosmic Owl dream?”

She kept slurping her tea loudly for ten seconds before setting it down and exhaling.  “Many times,” she said at last. “As my intention has long been merged with the universe, I am particularly attuned to the unpredictable forces which bind weal and woe, so it is not infrequently that my dreams are visited by that harbinger of fate.  In fact, one such dream several years ago was what guided me to this forest.”

Macy slammed her cup on the table, spilling half her remaining tea.  “Storytime!” she exclaimed. “Storytime! Storytime!”

“Storytime!” agreed Razz.

HW looked at her girlfriend with a tilted smile.  “You already know this story.”

“I know that I know, but I like the way you tell it.”

“Very well.  I shall now regale you with the story of the dream which eventually led me to the Evil Forest.”

She then regaled them with the story of the dream which eventually led her to the Evil Forest.

* * *

In the lands to the north, where a mad king ruled over icy wastes, a lone traveler carved a path through billowing snowbanks.  Behind her, a donkey made of sheerest ice carried a small wooden cart bundled with various supplies — a mixture of survival gear, academic texts, and novelty wooden horses.  In one hand she held the donkey’s lead; in the other, a shovel. With no small measure of haste she dug into the smallest portion of the snowy hill before her, tossing the snow behind the cart as she toiled.  A penguin waddled over and sank into the seemingly-undisturbed snow behind her; her efforts had filled in her own path even as she was carving it.

Once enough snow was dislodged for her to safely pass through to the next relatively stable patch of ground, she paused and wiped a thick-gloved hand across her brow.  Her woolen parka was pulled over her eyes to as to shield them from the sun’s harsh glare reflecting off the white landscape around her, and a checker-pattern scarf was pulled over her mouth to ward off the biting dryness.  For just a moment, as she was resting, she relented to part the fabric over her face.

“What do you think, Boomer?” she asked to the donkey.  “Is it time for a break?” As she spoke, she pulled the parka and scarf back over her face and crouched, bouncing her knees arrythmically.

The donkey snorted and shook its head.  As it overtook the traveler’s position, it dragged an icy hoof through the snow.

“I figured you’d say that,” she sighed, standing back upright.  “You’re right, too,” she conceded, looking up at the sky, where a storm was gathering at the horizon’s edge.  “I’d aimed to make the forest by nightfall, but I doubt we can wait so long to camp unless I wish to test fortune’s mood.”

Boomer stared at her and tilted its head in confusion, flicking its ears.

“Sorry, Boomer,” she said, laughing.  “I guess I picked up a few literary allusions at Icy U along with my half a degree.  Don’t worry, I won’t become  _ too _ stuffy and proper.”

As she pressed forward, the wind began to pick up, weathering existing snowbanks even as it formed new ones.  It wasn’t long before she found herself needing to use the shovel once again. She started muttering a shanty to herself —  _ “My old man has two left feet / He walks slow and not quite straight / But if you want fancy gait / Then at that he can’t be beat!” _   The horse began to whinny along.

Soon her breath formed crystals on her scarf and she had to pull it down.  Her teeth began chattering as she continued singing —  _ “My best friend has two right hands / She can’t hold on to a thing / But if you want art or bling / She will meet your best demands!” _   Several penguins were now following her, quacking in syncopation to her song, but she was too intent on making headway to notice them.

After a while, she grabbed a hand telescope from the cart and zoomed in on the forest to judge her distance.  She could make it there before the storm, Gob willing. She tossed the hand-shaped instrument back into the cart.   _ “Nextdoor neighbor has no legs / Xe plays patience solitaire / Xe thinks cheating isn’t fair / Still draws aces on the regs!” _   Her arms were growing tired from shoveling, her breath hoarse and ragged.

In her mind, she knew she was drawing closer to the forest, but as her vision began to cloud ever so slightly, it seemed as distant as when she had begun her journey.  The wagging of her donkey’s tail now served as a conductor’s baton for the literal marching band of penguins which followed and accompanied her.  _ “I myself am out of place / Nothing ventured, nothing gained / No limb or appendage strange / For, you see, I have no face!” _   And judging by how much her nose stuck except on the part where it didn’t sting at all, that could be true soon.

By the time she reached the brush that marked the very perimeter of the forest, the winds had begun to pick up in earnest, carrying sheets of snow like walls of impenetrable static.  Angry stormclouds hid the sun, making it impossible to judge the hour, but at this point the cycle of days would not be what forced her to camp. She stumbled through the snow and grass — the presence of the nearby forest must have prevented as much snow from building up here as everywhere else — attempting to reach the treeline.  A warm pushed her from behind as she faltered. “Thanks, Boomer,” she rasped. Then she fell unconscious.

When the dream began, Huntress Wizard thought she had woken up, still in that cruel brushfield.  The storm raged on, but it was now the dead of night. A chill ran down her spine as she sat up, legs crossed.  The moon above was visible in front of the clouds. She clasped her hands together and recited ancient words of power; as she brought them apart, a green flame appeared between them, casting a dim light that illuminated the landscape for miles.

Her donkey and cart were nowhere to be seen, disappeared without a trace save hoofprint-shaped indentations all around her.  The falling snow around her reflected the green of the fireball, but other than that, she couldn’t see anything in the direction she had come from.  There were no penguins, no hills, no ground. Two small snowspouts formed at the edges of her fireball, curling like ram’s horns; the sight terrified her for some reason, so she sprang to her feet and dropped it on the ground, where it lit a dead bramble bush.

She turned and saw the forest, now illuminated by the light from the bramble fire.  It was not the same forest; it was much thicker, and its trees were broad-leafed rather than needled.  The forest grew brighter for a moment as the moon loomed larger above it. Then it crashed in the middle, sending up awave of debris.  HW barely raised her arms in time to stop a pinecone from pelting her in the eyes. When she looked again, the trees were wilting, and a cacophony of animal wails echoed from within the forest.

Without thinking, she ran into the forest, charging blindly through curtains of vines.  She followed the sounds of pain until she reached a large tree whose branches were turning grey and breaking off before her eyes.  A massive dragon made of grass was gnawing at its roots; sap poured out, turning to blood as it flowed toward a horrified Huntress Wizard.  She stepped into the sticky red fluid, which stuck to her suddenly-bare feet as she walked. Cringing, she made her way to the dragon and punched it.

The dragon roared in pain, which scared away the trees above, clearing a path through which the moon was once again visible.  From the sky came the Cosmic Owl, who let out a hoot and then was swallowed by another dragon. This one was much larger, pale grey, and had a thousand eyes going down the length of its body.  It latched onto the grass dragon’s torso, causing the great beast to writhe in pain.

HW reached into the blood and pulled out an oaken bow with a sinewy drawstring, as well as a single sharp tooth.  She placed the tooth on the bowstring like an arrow, aimed at the grass dragon’s eye, drew, and fired.

Then she felt a sharp pain in her eye and woke up.  She was nestled in the hollow of a tree, her donkey and cart parked safely outside.  Judging by the odd way her coat had been pulled about her, she guessed the icy beast had dragged her here after she fainted from exhaustion.

“Good boy, Boomer,” she muttered before drifting into unconsciousness once more.

* * *

For the rest of the day Macy couldn’t get that story out of her head.  When she and Robin pelted the huntress with followup questions, she dodged half of them and was coy about the other half.  Apparently, she was comfortable enough around them to discuss a vague premonition she had years ago about a then-forthcoming ecological disaster, yet when it came to the subject of why she of all people had gone to college (let alone without completing her degree) she decided that was too personal.  Her responses about the subject of the dream were even more vague; if the huntress had any suspicions about what anything in the dream specifically referred to, she wasn’t sharing them.

As Huntress Wizard was showing her how to carve a piece of wood to use it in building a shelter, Macy felt her mind wandering once more.  They were working with sticks broken off an old willow tree, so she was reminded of the willow bow which sometimes appeared in her dreams.  She couldn’t recall where she had first gotten the idea for a bow made of willow, but evidently it had stuck with her.  _ Stay focused on the task, _ she chided herself.   _ Your new mentor is judging you. _   That thought reminded her of the bow HW had mentioned; she decided to test fortune’s mood once more.

“What was up with that blood bow?” she asked as she tested the flexibility of the branch she was holding.  A bit too soft.

The huntress paused.  “It’s a symbol,” she said, not looking Macy in the eye.  “It means… It represents a desire to protect others.”

That clearly wasn’t all it meant, but Macy doubted she’d get more than that out of her mentor tonight.  She picked up a large, complex branch and broke off another stick. “So I guess that part’s relatively straightforward, then.  Your protectiveness over nature will allow you to defeat whatever’s hurting the forest and restore balance.”

Huntress Wizard put down her own branched and sighed.  She finally looked over at Macy, revealing the bags under her green, catlike eyes.  “Macadamia,” she said. “You need to focus. You’re putting way too much thought into that dream story; I’m starting to regret having told you.”

“Well, maybe I wouldn’t be thinking about it so hard if you would fill in the gaps in the story.”

“You wouldn’t, though.  Your priorities have been all discombobbitilated this whole time.  If it weren’t the story, it would be the music, or your leg, or just congratulating yourself on your accomplishments.”

“I just don’t get why you care so much.  I’m here to learn; I’m learning.”

“I care because it means you can’t fully devote yourself to any one task.  A huntress must be able to track a million different scents, yes, but she also must have the resolve to ignore all but the scent of her quarry when she needs to.  You can’t simply change your objectives like a weathervane.”

Macy chuckled.  “I think you’ll find that I can.”

A soft smile spread across HW’s weary face.  “That’s because you’re a child. You still have that vivacity that lets the tiniest flower break the strongest rock.  But I suspect that in your case there’s something else there. You’re very responsible.”

The nut stood up with a knee-bent head-tilt.  “What does that mean?”

“First of all, don’t skilt with a stick in your hands unless you want to bang your knee.”

“Skilt?”

“That thing with your knee.  It’s called skilting.”

“I didn’t know there was a word for it.”  The knowledge filled Macy with more joy than it probably should have.

“Second, I haven’t known you for very long, but you seem to have a drive to finish whatever you set out to do, which is a very admirable quality, but you’re also too quick to give yourself  _ more _ responsibilities.  You have too many goals, which makes it hard for you to focus on any individual one; that’s not a good quality for a pro-body to have.  I won’t press you on what they are, but you might want to consider crossing a few things off your bucket list just so you can stop thinking about them.”

Macy clasped her hand around a dead leaf; the sensation on her fingers seemed to feel more like envelope paper than it actually did.  “You might be right about that.”

* * *

That night, Macy lay in the guest bed with a blanket of wool over her, turning her lucky coin around in her fingers.  She knew what she had to do — there was no avoiding that any longer. She should have done it a long time ago, but it was too late for that.  Better now than not at all. Still, she found it hard to work up the courage.

Her clenching fingers fumbled, nearly dropping the coin onto the crude wooden floor below.  With a reflexive jab and more than a little luck, she managed to catch it as it was tumbling.  Breathing heavily, she lifted it up and peered through the pentagonal hole in the middle. There were no floral patterns on the wall for her to make more hectic, and anyway the forest outside didn’t need help with that.  She was procrastinating again.

Finally, she reached into her backpack, lying by the head of her bed, and withdrew the familiar periwinkle envelope.  The envelope was beginning to crinkle and soften at the corners, and she could smell the decaying glue. With a grimace, she slid the coin across the front of the envelope, opening it and dumping the parchment onto her lap.  The handwriting of the letter was not as fancy as Masse’s signature on the envelope, but it was still recognizably his. Seeing it brought memories flooding back.

She focused on the tactile feeling of her fingers on the letter, rooting herself in the material world, as she began to read.

_ “My darling Macy, _

_ “Princeso’s making me write this.  He thinks I shouldn’t let our fight in the chocolate aviary be the last thing I say to you, so I’m putting this stuff in a letter.  Hopefully you read it before we see each other again; otherwise there was no point to me writing this in the first place, and while it would be kinda funny for me to be right about this being a waste of time, I don’t want my time to retroactively have been wasted.  Maybe that’s silly of me. I dunno. _

_ “I don’t know what I can say, though.  I donked up, and I know that. I’m sorry.  Will you forgive me? Let me know in person when we meet up, though.  I want to be able to look into your eyes when you say it. Just know that I’ve never thought of you as any more different than anyone else.  That’s probably not what you want to hear — you’re not ashamed of who you are, you just don’t want to be excluded because of it. It’s the truth, though, and Princeso said I should be honest. _

_ “Oh yeah, I mentioned us meeting up.  Princeso said that he’d try to arrange that at some point.  My birthday just happened, so let’s make it on yours. Assuming you want to, that is. [illegible] _

_ Yours forever, _

_ Seyv” _

The signature took Macy aback; ‘Seyv’ hadn’t been something anyone called Masse since before Macy had dropped out of public school.  She guessed he was feeling exactly as nostalgic for the simpler days of their friendship as he was. In truth, she hadn’t thought much of the incident in the aviary since it happened, mostly because those memories were painful; she allowed them to flood over her now.

She was standing there once more, underneath the cacao tree, with the red chocolate eagle eyeing her suspiciously.  Masse was telling her what she already knew — that finding out whether the Duke was actually her father wouldn’t change anything about who she was.  He spoke those fateful words. “I’m an orphan, too.”

“I’m not a nut,” Macy echoed, but the words were hollow.  That pain wasn’t there anymore. After living in a city of nuts, that emotional separation was muffled.  She could remember feeling it but not what it felt like.

Masse ran away, and this time Macy watched him go.  Then Princess Torte approached her, a worried look in her eyes that seemed out of place given Macy’s composure.  “Um, are you okay?” she asked, extending a hand.

Macy took it.  “I’m fine,” she said truthfully as a jolt of static went through her nut body.  What was this feeling, so out of place? Her emotions were a whirling weathervane.

“No, you’re  _ not _ fine,” insisted the young princess.  “You’re having a panic attack. Come on, let’s get you back to your folks.”

“I… I  _ have _ folks.”  Now she wasn’t playing along with the memory at all.  “Nice folks. You’re right, I’m worrying them.” It was true, too.  Still, a little more time with the Princess couldn’t hurt.

A dark thought occurred to Macy just then, forcing her to discontinue that train of thought abruptly and crash back into lucidity.  She scrutinized the illegible portion of the letter. If her feelings on that day had changed for that reason, then she suspected she knew what else Masse Yvoire might have written.

Unfortunately, she was right.  Most of it was still unintelligible, but she could successfully identify enough letters to piece together one of the redacted words: “adopted.”  She let out a deep sigh and extinguished the candle on her bedside desk. The white chocolate chip, abandoned by his nut friend, was probably feeling lonelier now than she had been on the day of the banquet.

_ That didn’t help reduce the burden of my responsibilities one iota. _   In total darkness, she slipped the letter back into her backpack, curled under the wool blanket, and drifted off into an uneasy slumber.

* * *

Macy was on the prowl.  It was the next morning, and after a breakfast of leftover venison, Huntress Wizard had decided to test her again.  The tone of the huntress’s voice had made it clear that Macy needed to get it right this time. She fixed her eyes on the trail she was following to stop her mind from wandering where it would go.  Staying focused without becoming hyperfocused required a conscious effort, but after two days of training, she was basically a pro.

At last she came across a clearing, where a notably two-headed cool cat crouched over a small mound with a door in the front.  Inside, she could hear the muffled sounds of some ∏-FLAVR song. Judging by the way the cat’s tail twitched, it enjoyed the song about as little as Macy.  Knowing this tickled her. (I’ll stay quiet.)

Several tense minutes later, the music turned off.  Macy saw the feline’s ears twitched and guessed it was hearing the rabbit ascend through its warren; a second later she could hear it too.  She held her breath as the wind changed. Hopefully the cat would be too focused on its own approaching quarry to notice Macy’s smell.

There was a creak as the warren door pushed open and a fierce-eyed brown rabbit poked its snout out.  The cool cat raised its hackles, preparing to pounce. For her part, Macy clenched her fingers around a small green tag that her mentor had given her.  She would only get one chance to do this.

She closed her eyes and hummed a strange familiar song — the song she had heard last midnight.  She saw the clearing before her once again, but this time from all perspectives at once. She was the puma, the grass, a starling high in a tree, a crystal golem slumbering deep in the ground.  Everything came together in a vast mosaic, and her melody was the song that bound it together. When she opened her eyes, she knew exactly what to do next.

Everything happened at once.  The rabbit stepped fully out of its warren, yawning blearily as the dappled morning light hit its eyes.  The cat leapt forward, claws unsheathed, with a mighty “mrow!” Macy propelled herself with her walking sticks, pushing them away for that extra iota of speed.

The frigid feline tackled the rabbit, coating its fur on contact with a thin sheen of ice, just as Macy landed next to it.  Before it had time to react to this new development, she was already rolling away. She reached up and slapped the tag onto its tail, hearing the magical twine latch on, before flinging herself away into the treeline.  A startled starling flew away. The cat glanced around, confused, but didn’t think to look up. Satisfied that whatever that had been did not concern it, it picked up the rabbit in its mouth and trod away.

Five minutes later, as her arms were screaming, Macy decided the coast was clear.  She carefully swung her way over to where she had dropped her walking sticks. Finally able to stand up, she took several deep breaths and then shouted, “Huntress Wizard!  Robin! Mission accomplished!”

“I know,” said a voice from behind her.  Macy whirled around on one foot to see HW standing there, just finishing transforming from a sapling.  “You did very well. However, you exposed yourself to great danger. You were lucky that the cool cat was so uncautious, especially since it was one that knew you from before.”

“I wanted the best chance to succeed.”  The nut crossed her arms and furrowed her brow.  “That meant taking risks.”

“I’ve been trying to instill in you the way of the huntress, and that way involves caution.  That said—” the huntress raised a finger to stall out her protege’s objection — “the way of the huntress is not the only way to be a pro-body.  I was perhaps overly harsh with you before. Just because I’m imparting unto you my knowledge and experience doesn’t mean I should try to make you conform to my ideology as well.”

Macy let out a resigned sigh.  “No, you were right. I didn’t become a huntress so I could be a huntress, I became one so I could be an adventurer.”

“And that’s a perfectly valid reason.”  HW knelt down and put a hand on Macy’s shoulder.  “Macadamia the Nut, fourth marquess Jugland, sentinel of the forest, you have a gift that goes far beyond anything I can teach you.  Dedication freely given, responsibility unflaggingly kept, is not something to be scorned or spurned. While your attitude is not that of a huntress, your heart is, because you have chosen it to be.  The fact that you did so to impress me is irrelevant. Nature doesn’t care about motives, so I shouldn’t either. In fact, I think your attitude might be exactly what the forest needs.”

Macy’s next words came out in a stuttering gasp.  “T-true f-f-facts?”

Huntress Wizard nodded.  “True facts. In all the years I’ve been investigating this forest, I have made little progress, and I now believe that’s because I have been too patient, too huntress-like.  I’m trying to investigate, to learn, but I’m failing because I’m not taking enough risks. You, on the other hand, aren’t learning because I’m not teaching you right. You learn by example, by seeing something and then doing it yourself.”

“Isn’t that what we’ve been doing this whole time?”

She shook her head.  “I’ve been taking this too slowly.  We need to go directly to the source of the problem.  From this point forward, your training will be cinnamonymous with my mission to uncover the truth behind the disaster that befell this forest and upset the balance of nature.”

“What are you talking about?”  Macy’s fingers were going numb; she nearly lost her grip on her walking sticks.  “What makes you think I’m capable of this?”

“I had my suspicions the first time, but when you harmonized with nature again just now they confirmed it.  That is a difficult skill — not unreasonably so, but still not one I would have expected you to learn with me specifically teaching it to you.”

“Confirmed what?”

“I don’t know exactly what the ramifications of this will be, but it has to be you, Macy.  The figure from my dream, the one who will help to rid the forest of its invader. You are the thousand-eyed dragon.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK boomer. (This chapter was written months before “OK boomer” was a meme)
> 
> Honestly, I don't have a lot to say about this chapter. I guess the biggest thing is there's a lot of dreaming going on. Dreams were a big part of Adventure Time, and they'll be a big part of this story, too, but… actually, no, in a kind of similar way. This story is kinda similar to Adventure Time. What are the odds?
> 
> But yeah, I love hinting at all these big lore things I have planned, like HW's backstory and the narrator — both of which have been hinted at before, by the way. I was debating whether or not to include that bit where the narration suddenly goes into first-person, but at some point I decided that I'd need to do it eventually, and I'm tired enough to think it's a good idea to do it now of all times.
> 
> For the most part, everything in this chapter is either paying off stuff I set up a while back or setting up stuff for the long term. I don't think I'm fooling anyone by pretending Robin's dream isn't important, cosmic owl or no cosmic owl, and those of you who have an encyclopedic knowledge of one-off Adventure Time episodes might have a good idea now at what characters may appear in the future, especially combined with one-off lines dropped in previous chapters.
> 
> The one thing that I stressed about a lot before writing it, not just in this chapter but in this entire fic, was Masse's letter. Masse has an important role in the structure of Half Past Adventure, essentially being a fakeout deuteragonist for the first chapter, and his unopened letter was one of the few plot threads linking Macy's new (currently suspended) status quo to her old life. Opening it is like losing an old friend, but it's something she has to do, even if the results sting. Writing that letter myself was actually quite difficult, since I actually had to pin down a lot of what I wanted to do with Masse, the person I wanted him to be and to eventually become, by the process of writing it. You'll see how that pans out in the future, since that's how linear time works.
> 
> Preview (sorry it's been a week):  
> Zhe had learned the hard way that picking at a fresh scab like that will only slow down the healing process. Ever since zhe’d learned that, zhe’d stopped picking at other peoples’ scabs almost completely.


	10. The Grass Dragon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Huntress Wizard, Macy, and Robin set out to find and eliminate the cause of the disturbances in the Evil forest for good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're getting into the final section of “Flight of Fancy” now! Things are ramping up bigtime, and we're starting to reach the point where things that have been set up a while back are beginning to pay off. We already had a little of that last chapter with Masse's letter, but now we're finally going to have some action. God, I love that. I was initially afraid I'd burn out before even getting this far, to be honest, but here we are. It's exciting.
> 
> I'm pretty proud of how this chapter turned out, and I hope you guys enjoy it. I felt all the emotions while I was writing it. Yes, even that one. And that one. Not that one, though, you weirdo. Why would you think that? (I felt _that_ one while writing [The Huntress's Wife](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21404101).)
> 
> Anyway, NaNoWriMo went well, which means I'm behind on my buffer. By “went well” I mean “I did manage to write 50k words in a month, but I'd be lying if I said those 50k words could reasonably said to be a complete novel”. I'd need to add another 10~25k words to get the story to a good stopping place, and that's if I consider it to be the first installment in a series. Maybe I'll publish a highly edited version of it someday, many years from now. The point is, right now I'm down to slightly more than two chapters in the buffer, but I'll be able to build that back up now.
> 
> Your discussion prompt for today: When's a time where you tried to do something and failed for a reason you should have known ahead of time but didn't? For me it'd have to be trying to write a NaNo novel about a massive cross-country road trip despite having already written enough to know for a fact that I wouldn't be able to get that all out in 50k words.

Macy grimaced as she downed the last gulp of healing potion.  The elixir had become chunky, overcurdled by the spite of the surrounding forest’s invasive creatures; going down her throat, it had the same texture as vomit.  Perhaps not coincidentally, that was also what Macy wanted to do. She closed her eyes, winced, and tried to block out both the lingering aftertaste of the potion and the smell of tanning hide that permeated the air.

“That should do it,” came Razz’s voice.  When Macy’s eyes fluttered open, her vision was clear of a fog she hadn’t noticed settling in.  She was sitting on the couch in Razz and Huntress Wizard’s treehouse, swaddled in a woolen blanket, with a still-warm bark mug in her hands.  The berry was sitting beside her, holding a cauldron containing the dregs of the healing potion over her head like it was a fashion statement.  “You took to that like a champ. The first time I had a healing potion, I couldn’t even bring myself to swallow it until Hunnybuns cut it with some chili.”

“I assume it’s too much to hope that it was the kind of chili that’s all beans?”

Razz laughed, putting a hand to her mouth.  “What, are you suddenly a vegetarian?”

“I’m certainly getting there.”

“Oh, come now, meat’s great!  Meat and furniture, life’s greatest treasures.”  She let out a wistful sigh, a faraway look in her eyes.  Setting the cauldron down next to the arm of the couch, she rose and inspected Macy’s leg, which was glowing faintly green behind the cast.  “Well, it certainly  _ appears _ to be working.  Wiggle your toes for me, Macy.”

She obliged.  The feeling of an appendage moving which for several days could not was like a rusty door groaning unsteadily on its hinges.  Razz seemed satisfied, for she began undoing the bindings on the cast. “I do declare, while that isn’t the  _ fastest _ I’ve seen someone recover from a leg injury, it’s certainly up there.”

Macy shrugged, relishing the brush of air past her leg for the first time as the cast finally came off.  “Us macadamias are a tough genus.”

“I’m sure.  Can you bend your knee?”

She could, but not without a loud cracking sound and mild discomfort.  Nevertheless, Macy took the opportunity to stand on her own two feet for the first time in days, unceremoniously dumping her blanket on the floor.  She took a wide stance and shouted for all the world to hear, “I’m back!”

“Yes, and better than ever,” agreed Razz, picking up the blanket and arranging it carefully over the back of the couch.  She tapped Macy’s newly-healed leg. “It’ll be stronger than it was before, you know. Bitterness breeds growth.”

“That’s a neat expression.  Mind if I borrow it?”

“But you were the one who — ah, never mind.”  Razz picked up the cauldron and began carrying it back to the cauldron chamber.  “I’m just glad you’re better. I haven’t seen you so exuberant.”

“You haven’t?”

Razz spun around to stare at Macy, eye to eye.  “The entire time I’ve known you, you had that broken leg.”

“Oh.  Right.  Sometimes I forget how recently we actually met each other.”  She put on her backpack, which she had dumped next to the couch when she came in.  “It feels like I’ve been living here for three months.”

“The funny thing is, if you were here that long, we wouldn’t have even needed the healing potion; your leg would have healed on its own by now.”

“Yeah, but your dad would have killed me,” came a goblin’s from the door outside.  Macy walked over and let Robin and Huntress Wizard in. Both were covered in twigs and burs, and Robin’s tail was a complete disaster.  “More than he already will, I mean.  Or at least embarrass himself trying.”

“Hey, Robin,” said Macy, leaning against a wall and crossing her legs.  “Notice anything different about me?”

Robin tilted zhir head, lighting up zhir horn in the way zhe did when zhe needed to tell what color things were.  “Did you get a haircut?”

“I don’t have hair.  What about you?” she asked HW.  “Would you like to guess?”

The huntress looked at Macy’s legs, then back at her face, several times, before shaking her head.  “Nah, I want to see if Robin will get it.”

“Good choice.”

Robin stretched around Macy like a sash to examine her from every angle.  “Did you get a new outfit?”

“Robin, I’m naked, like always.  Unless the backpack I’ve had for years counts as a new outfit.”

Zhe scratched zhir horn.  “I dunno, this is a stumper.  Can you give me a hint?”

“You’re gonna kick yourself if you don’t guess it.”

“Hm.  Oh!” Zhe uncoiled zhirself and snapped zhir claws.  “You finally got a pedicure!”

“No, I didn’t.”

Zhe peered down at Macy’s foot.  “Well, you should. Your toenails are nasty.  I’m not entirely sure why you  _ have _ toenails, to be honest, but that’s a question for another day.”

Macy narrowed her eyes in indignation.  “My leg’s healed, you dillweed.”

“Oh.”  A beat.  “Hey, can you guess what—”

“You lost your tail buttons.”

Robin hung zhir head, ears drooping, color palette muted.  “Man, you’re  _ way _ better at this than I am.  Well, I think I know where I stashed ‘em, but it’s not safe to go there any more, so they’re as good as lost.”

“Not safe?” Macy asked with a skilt.  “How do you mean?”

“Zhe means the beasts are growing restless,” said Huntress Wizard.  Her head was low, her leafy hair casting a shadow over her eyes; between her hands was an orb of green flame.  In the flame an image appeared of a two-headed cougar running through a crystalline cavern. A familiar tag was attached to its tail.

HW continued, waving her hands around the orb to scroll the picture through a panorama of similarly-tagged, similarly-restless creatures.  “Whether your arrival precipitated this change, or this was merely fortune’s inscrutable gambit, I have no idea. Irregardlessly, there has been some new disturbance in the natural order, or else a worsening of the existing one.  Herds are migrating to new territories. The politics of the forest are upset. Loners are banding together, and old alliances are shattering.”

Macy suddenly remember the sheer magnitude of the task she had taken on as a condition of her apprenticeship and grew nervous.  “Has this happened before?”

“Yes, but it’s ahead of schedule.  Every month or so, whatever has been causing the perturbances and extinctions has a burst of activity, and everything else in the forest moves around to accommodate.  This is the first time it’s been a week early.”

“And you don’t know what’s causing it?”

“We’ve tried to scry on the epicenter of the disturbances, but it’s always shielded, and investigating the area directly once the denizens of the forest have stopped fleeing has never yielded results.”

Macy snapped her fingers.  “So now you want to investigate  _ while _ they’re fleeing.”

The huntress nodded solemnly.  “Yes.” Her voice came out as a croak.

Razz, who had re-entered the main room at some point, put her hands on the side of her head, distress written on her face in 36pt Impact font (metaphorically).  “What the [redacted]!?” she shouted. “That’s ridiculously dangerous! Confronting a mob of panicked animals directly — why?”

“Because we have no choice.”  Huntress Wizard clapped her hands together, extinguishing the scrying-flame.  She turned to face the distraught berry.  “I know it’s risky, but this holding pattern isn’t going anywhere.  Combined with Robin’s presence, this isn’t an opportunity we can afford to pass up.”

“My presence?”  Robin’s color palette resaturated.

“Yes.  My girlfriend can brew up potions to mask our scent, and between that and your oculomancy, we should be able to hide ourselves from many of the beasts and monsters fleeing ground zero.”

“I will do no such thing!” harrumphed Razz, crossing her arms and spinning to face away.  “This is dangerous lunacy and you won’t see me enable it.”

“Wha—”  HW’s head jerked back in shock, her hair standing up.  She was clearly frizz-frazzled. “Wildling, you know I need to do this.”

“No, you don’t.  You  _ want _ to do this, because you’re losing patience.  Wasn’t it you who taught me that a huntress must wait for her moment to strike?”

“Honey—”

Macy rolled her eyes and pushed her mentor across the room.  The startled goblin lost her balance and fell onto her knees right behind her girlfriend.  “Honey,” she repeated, “I don’t want you to think I’m just doing this for me.”

“Right, you’re doing it for the world.”  Razz whirled around again to face her girlfriend; her eyes were wide and wet with tears.

“Not the world.”  HW gave Razz a tight hug.  “I’m doing it for  _ us. _   So we can move on from this phase.”

Robin leaned over to Macy as the goblin and berry sobbed in the middle of the treehouse.  “Where did this come from?” zhe whispered.

“I don’t know,” Macy whispered back, “but I don’t want it to continue for one minute longer than it needs to.”

“Okay,” Razz said eventually, breaking away from the hug.  Her voice still had the echoes of a sob. “I’ll make the potions you need.  It shouldn’t take more than an hour if you don’t need anything specialized. But in exchange, you promise to stay as safe as you reasonably can.”

“Of course I will,” replied Huntress Wizard.

“I need you to come home in one piece, after all.”

Macy chose that moment to strategically walk out of the front door and plummet six meters onto the forest floor.

* * *

Robin spent the better part of an hour digging a now-muddy but uninjured Macy out of the ground and getting her sorted.  Zhe probed her shell carefully for any fractures and only grew more worried when zhe didn’t find any. Zhe knew zhir friend could be reckless, but this was ridiculous, and zhe made sure Macy knew this.

“Didn’t you once climb up the steepest cliff-face in Jugland Pass just to see how long it would take you?” asked Macy, wiping dirt off her nut brow.

“This isn’t about me,” replied Robin.  Zhe almost added,  _ “But hey, at least neither of us are as reckless as Masse,” _ but zhe stopped herself.  There had been more times than she cared to admit over the past week and a half where her first instinct had been to mention that jerk — that is to say, that friend of Macy’s.  Masse was a scab that Robin desperately wanted to pick at. Zhe had learned the hard way that picking at a fresh scab like that will only slow down the healing process. Ever since zhe’d learned that, zhe’d stopped picking at other peoples’ scabs almost completely.

“But hey,” laughed Macy.  “At least neither of us are as reckless as Masse.”

Robin’s jaw hung open.  Not because Macy had just said that, but because she didn’t have an anguished expression on her face.  Sorrowful, wistful, and grimacing from the lingering taste of dirt in her mouth, to be sure, but not anguished.  The nut evidently picked up on Robin’s shock, for she immediately followed up with, “I finally read the letter last night.”

Robin’s jaw hung further before zhe shook zhir head clear.  Zhe could feel zhir colors unconsciously shifting. “When were you planning on telling me this?”

“When we got a moment alone.  Which I guess we just did. Which is why I told you.”

“What did it say?”  Robin wasn’t sure why zhe cared so much.  The charitable answer as that zhe was concerned for zhir friend, so zhe assumed that must be the answer.  Mystery solved.

“That he’s sorry, and that he wants to see me sometime.”  Macy paused; the next thought took its sweet time forming on her lips before she said it.  “Robin, I think he’s lonely.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”  Robin swatted the air with zhir forepaw.  “He’s got Princeso, while you’re stuck with me.”

Macy chuckled.  “Yeah, I guess so.”  The dark cloud that had fallen over her face passed.  Robin was glad for that. Zhe didn’t want zhir friend harboring any guilt for the way that jerk was feeling.  It was bad enough to be an unadopted orphan for twelve years, though Macy didn’t have the context needed to understand that as anything but normal.  If she took even an iota of responsibility for leaving Masse behind, it might be enough to break her.

A short while later, HW glided gracefully down from the treehouse, her cape spread between her arms like a kite, three bubbling potions in one hand, three glowing axes in the other.  When she landed, she handed Robin and Macy a potion and axe each. The axe had a bold aura which Robin could tell was yellow without even using zhir horn. Zhe uncorked zhir potion and took a whiff; it smelled repugnant, like two-week-old egg salad that zhir dad would always insist was still totally edible if you ignored the ensuing stomach cramps and diarrhea.

“Drink up,” said the huntress, grimacing.  Clearly she was no more excited at the prospect than Robin.

Once they swallowed their potions simultaneously, zhe noticed a difference almost immediately.  There was a sensation zhe could only describe as a flash of smell, after which… It wasn’t that the distinctive scents of the three were any different, or even muted.  It wasn’t that the stench of the potions overpowered them. Rather, something had been added which commingled with their scents, relegating them to the background as something mildly unpleasant but overall unconcerning, like a creaky desk drawer that one hadn’t used frequently in the first place.  A predator on the trail wouldn’t lose them, but a fleeing animal would pay them no heed.

“Your turn,” said HW, but Robin hardly needed to be cued.  Zhe concentrated all zhir magical power into zhir horn and funneled it into zhirself, Macy, and HW.  The specific spell was something zhe had used a few times in the past, and wasn’t much different from typical color-changing, but zhe had never targeted other people with it and wasn’t sure if zhe could.

A faint aura enveloped the three of them, bending and absorbing the light around them.  After a moment, the other two’s visages seemed to blur and blend into the background, like delicate watercolor portraits smudged by a careless four-year-old.  Apart from the yellow aura of the axes, all of their color palettes shifted to match what was behind them. Robin stretched around them to ensure it was working on all sides, as well as for zhirself.

“I’ll need to concentrate on maintaining this,” zhe whispered for some reason, “so I won’t be good for much else.”

“That’s okay,” Huntress Wizard whispered back.  “I didn’t expect you to be anyway.”

“What was that?”

“I said that’s okay.  Let’s move out.”

As the trio headed through the woods, HW stopping occasionally to listen to the trees or scry into another fireball for directional cues, Robin’s tail kept snagging on thornbushes and wildflowers.  After painfully losing a tuft of hair dallying through a particularly nasty rosebush, zhe decided enough was enough and began searching the forest floor for something to braid into zhir tail in place of the buttons.

Huntress Wizard, evidently annoyed by the sound of zhir scavenging, or else worried said sounds would give them away to the bone-bats that were already fleeing past, asked Robin what in Grob’s name zhe was doing.  When Robin told her, she reached into a bag at her side and lent her some pinecones she was saving in order to make cloak clasps. Now, rather than being annoyed as zhe stopped repeatedly to free zhir tail from vegetation, the huntress could get all the annoyance out at once as zhe stopped to preen and braid zhir tail.  (Until today, Robin hadn’t known how much harder it was to work with hair that was almost invisible.)

No sooner had Robin affixed one final pinecone into zhir tail than the huntress’s ears twitched.  Without saying a word, she spread out her arms and transformed into a sapling. Macy took this as a cue to jump headlong into the hollow of a nearby tree; a butterfly landed on one of her legs, apparently believing it to be a branch.  Her mind still in braiding mode, Robin didn’t think to do anything except sit perfectly still, fur standing on end.

A pack of large, bipedal wolves walked up to the place where the three had stopped, decked with torn-up formalwear and carrying an assortment of slipshod stone weaponry.  As they shambled past, Robin could detect the smell of untreated wounds on them. Several were limping, and the one in the front was clutching her arm and emitting a high-pitched whine.

_ Why-wolves. _   Robin had encountered these creatures before, and she could barely suppress a hate-filled growl.  These monsters were incredibly cunning, and they possessed an unfathomable bloodlust. If they encountered anything they didn’t understand, they would ‘investigate’ it by tearing it apart.  If some poor creature got on the wrong side of the pack — by existing in the wrong place at the wrong time — they would tear it to shreds without hesitation. Worst of all, they were incredibly condescending toward anyone whose knowledge of meaningless trivia didn’t exactly match their own, promoting a culture of toxic fandom that poisoned any potential discussion surrounding otherwise fun and engaging content.

“Wait!” said one near the front.  Despite being slouched over from an evident hip injury, he stood a head taller than the leader as he clasped her shoulder to make her stop.

“What is it, Cinderclaw?” growled the leader, turning her head to stare a challenge into his eyes.  Even behind her tiny pink-rimmed spectacles, her eyes packed a wild menace.

After a few terse moments of silence, the why-wolf named Cinderclaw glanced away, looking almost but not quite toward Macy.  “I… I thought I smelled something, Matron Leader,” he said. The deference in his voice had completely edged out his earlier urgency.

“I do to.  Smell lots of things.  What’s your point?” She didn’t stop staring at him; he shied away, hiding his face behind a raised paw.

“Matron Leader,” he mewled, “surely in your infinite curiosity you—”

“Silence!” she barked.  Cinderclaw attempted to take a step away and tripped over his own tail; landing on his back, he rolled onto his belly and began whimpering as Matron Leader continued to speak.  “I know what is best for pack. We flee now; investigate later. No use investigating if killed by leaf monster, no?”

She didn’t wait for a response; she merely kept walking, and the rest of the path moved so as to not get too close to the disgraced wolf on the ground.  They didn’t seem to notice that he didn’t get up at all, in fact. He simply kept lying there, shuddering, ears perked up—

—the rainicorn-dog blinked her ruby eyes.  Zhir vision being what it was, zhe needed a second glance to be certain she saw that right.  Sure enough, Cinderclaw’s ears were erect, and his tail lay flat along the ground. Beneath the sound of stampeding paws, she was sure she could make out his nose taking quick, deep sniffs.  Whatever affectation of shame and deference he was putting on, the why-wolf was as keen and alert as he could be.

Robin wasn’t sure if zhir companions were aware of this, but zhe was sure that zhe couldn’t warn them quick enough.  A why-wolf familiar with the forest wouldn’t be fooled by their disguises, and one who was on the hunt could have his jaws locked around even Huntress Wizard’s neck by the time she changed back.  The responsibility therefore fell to Robin to somehow make the beast step off.  _ Fleas and lice, this blows. _

The why-wolf’s eyes fixed on Robin’s.   _ Crap, he can see me, even with my magic.  That probably means illusions won’t work on him.  That’s all I’ve got! _   Panic welled up in zhir; zhir tail tucked up between her legs.   _ And pinecones are scratchy. _   Zhe forced zhirself to maintain eye contact with Cinderclaw, hoping against hope that sheer intimidation could work.

No such luck.  As the last of the pack passed him, his breath grew faster, disturbing a patch of dry grass in front of his snout.  As soon as the pack was out of sight, he would strike, and it would be too late for everyone. Well, it was entirely possible Huntress Wizard was strong enough that nothing bad would happen, but that wasn’t a chance Robin could take.  More and more, though, that seemed like the inevitable gamble. What could zhe do against a creature this cunning and perceptive? Zhir shapeshifting couldn’t make zhir any bigger or tougher, and zhir dreamwalking was totally useless in this situation.  That left zhir oculomancy, but how could zhe defeat a creature like this just by manipulating light? If only zhe had the ability to manipulate something dangerous, like fire.

Oh, wait.

For half a second, zhe surreptitiously recalled the power zhe had been using to cloak HW and Macy.  Zhe could reapply their disguises afterward. A startled butterfly flew away, distracting the why-wolf; there were some benefits in having an opponent driven by their base urges to observe and investigate everything meticulously.  Robin hoped he wouldn’t notice zhir funneling zhir power into the grass in front of him, bending the light that neared it to concentrate onto an ever smaller and smaller point until it began to smolder.

His nose noticed before his eyes did, judging by the way it crinkled.  Robin knew the sweet-ash scent of burning grass and smelled it sympathetically.  The why-wolf glanced around briefly, trying to locate the source of the flame, before he finally looked down and yelped at the tiny fire before him.  He backed away quickly, raising his hackles and baring his fangs as if the fire itself were encroaching on his territory.

Then he stopped, tilting his head as if suddenly realizing how strange this occurrence was.  Robin could practically see the line of logic in his eerily-intelligent eyes. After a few seconds, he decided that whatever force could spontaneously cause grass to ignite was not worth investigating without the support of the pack.  He stood quickly and bounded after the others, clutching his side as he called for them to wait up.

HW changed back just as Robin let zhirself heave a sigh of relief.  “That was some quick thinking,” she said.

Robin elected to ignore the surprise in the huntress’s voice as zhe reapplied zhir cloaking spell and then pulled Macy out of her tree.  “Yeah, well, we’re lucky I’m such a jerk or that probably wouldn’t have worked.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Robin leaned an elbow on Macy’s head as the nut wiped woodchips and leaf mulch off her face.  “I take it you don’t get very many why-wolves out in these parts?”

“I had no idea they were even in this forest.  They must have been deliberately avoiding detection, in which case this current disturbance isn’t just earlier than normal, it’s  _ bigger. _   We should probably be extra cautious.”

“But we won’t, though, right?”

“Probably not; that does seem to be the running theme.”

“You should probably be at least a little careful,” interjected Macy, brushing Robin’s arm off her head and making the rainicorn-dog fall onto the ground.  “You promised your girlfriend you’d get home safe right before I jumped out of the treehouse.”

“Plus, there’s the prophecy,” Robin added.  “If you’re right about what it means, then you and Macy both have pivotal parts to play in it.  Meanwhile I’m just along for the ride, I guess.” Which suited zhir just fine, but if zhe clarified that then zhe probably wouldn’t get as much pity-attention from Macy later on.

HW nodded in compliance.  “Let’s take to the trees, then.”  She leapt up like a brown-cloaked lightning bolt; Macy followed soon after, vaulting off tree branches to gain height.  Robin sighed and slithered up into the canopy. This is what zhe got for suggesting caution.  _ That’s the last time I suggest something reasonable, I swear to Glob. _

* * *

Huntress Wizard held up a hand to signal her two followers to halt as a flock of golden owlbats flew past.  Swarms of these creatures had popped up in regions of turmoil ever since GOLB’s failed entry into this world three decades ago.  More than any real danger, their presence was an ill omen. They fed on strife and disharmony, so for them to gather in such large numbers, something must have been horribly wrong.

Of course, HW knew this already; that wasn’t what truly unsettled her.  After all, the whole reason she was headed out in this direction was to track down the source of the disruption to the natural order that had plagued this forest for years.  She’d seen them around the forest before. In fact, even before the disaster she was investigating, many had made their home here.

No, what bothered her was the staging.  She was headed out in this direction to investigate a larger-than-usual disturbance that could potentially upset the ecosystem of the Forest of Monsters once and for all.  So why were the owlbats flying  _ away _ from the epicenter?  There were only two reasons that could be, and she wasn’t sure which was worse.

In a panic, she formed another scrying fire and flashed through various tagged creatures.  She let out a tiny sigh of conditional relief when she saw owlbats in the periphery of several other shots.  That meant that they were indeed fleeing the scene rather than heading to a specific destination. On the one hand, that meant there wasn’t something else going on she needed to be worried about; on the other hand, she was now even more worried about what she was headed toward.

She was so worried, in fact, that she didn’t notice the signs until it was too late.

“Rotting—!” she exclaimed, just before two stake-like legs slammed onto her shoulders from above, disrupting her spell and knocking her out of the tree.  She twisted in the air just on time to notice the green flame begin to spread before landing hard on her back. The world rung with blackness, and her ears glowed with bitter pain.

She crossed her arms, opened her eyes, and focused on a speck of light far above as she took a rattling breath;  through the searing pain her concentration returned to her. The creature above her paused, confused. Not wanting to alarm it, she let herself sink deeper into the soil as she transformed bit by bit into a swarm of butterflies.

By the time the evil “FREE TACOS” sign realized what was happening, Huntress Wizard was already reforming above it, glowing handaxe drawn.  As she swung down she let out a mighty yell, startling it so that it didn’t have time to respond. The enhanced blade clove through the rotting wood in a single slice, shattering it into musty splinters.

Above her, Robin and Macy weren’t doing as well.  Macy was hanging by her feet, fending off a stop sign with the Root Sword and a “road work ahead” sign with her axe; her backpack straps kept getting in the way of her swings, but she didn’t want to let it fall, presumably because she didn’t want to find out what would happen if the cell phone or broken flare gun inside got smashed.  Robin, for zhir part, was dodging a surprisingly-nimble “KEEP OUT” sign while attempting to douse the flames with zhir oculomancy. This, predictably, accomplished nothing.

HW sighed.  “Do I have to do everything?”  Then she drew her silvery bow, took three different-colored arrows from her quiver, quickly mumbled a jumble of arcane words of power, and fired three shots in quick succession.

A red arrow hit the stop sign and instantly rusted it through, causing it to come apart and fall out of the tree.  A yellow arrow slammed through the corner of the “KEEP OUT” sign; as it howled in pain, Robin took the opportunity to stretch zhir arms around and cleave it in twain with zhir handaxe.  The final arrow exploded into a spray of water, assuaging the fires before they had a chance to spread further.

Macy, evidently refreshed by the magical spray of water, brought her axe and sword to bear on the “road work ahead” sign, cleaving off its legs and surfing it down the drunk of a tree as she sliced it apart.  She and the sign both reached the bottom of the tree just when it stopped howling in a metallic screech of distress, a second behind the water. Huntress Wizard gently nudged the grinning nut out of the way of the stop sign’s falling remains.

“These noises will attract scavengers,” she announced tersely before taking off again, this time sticking to the low undergrowth.  She dared not take out her flame again, relying on memory and her sense of whence the owlbats had come. There was no time to recover those arrows, and she doubted she would be able to come back for them later.  Still, she was a bit disappointed on principle. A good huntress should always know where her arrows are, where they’ve been, and where they’re going.

* * *

Macy had to hold Robin’s tail to keep it from catching in the undergrowth, braids or no braids.  She nearly recommended the rainicorn-dog just chop the whole thing off, but she stopped herself at the last moment.  Where had  _ that _ come from?

“You seem on edge,” Robin whispered to her, morphing zhir body so that zhir mouth was close to her.  “What’s wrong?”

“First of all, that,” she said, pointing with her free hand (still gripping the Root Sword) at Robin’s mouth.  A beat. “What the patootie, that was so rude of me, I don’t know where that came from?”

“Nah, that’s fair.”  Zhe didn’t change zhir mouth position, though.  “What else?”

“I’ve still got that stupid ∏-FLAVR song stuck in my head from yesterday.  How are they still making music?”

“Actually, their early work still holds up as a revolutionary fusion of — hold on, this isn’t important right now.  What’s  _ actually _ bothering you?”

Macy took a deep breath.  “I think we might be walking into a trap.”

“Whaddaya mean, a trap?”

“I mean a situation designed to ensnare us into an unfavorable position, possibly with the intent of capturing us.”

“Okay, got it.  And why exactly do you think that?”

“Because this apparently unprecedented event happened a few days after I arrived — possibly the first visitor in years who isn’t a seasoned adventurer.  Because whatever is causing these disturbances isn’t doing anything to ward off HW’s magic, even though it can’t possibly be unaware of the tagged creatures.”  She paused before giving her last point, going over her memory to ensure it was accurate. “And because when she described the dream prophesying the actual saving of the Evil Forest, you weren’t in it.”

“Yeah, well, that’s probably just because I’m not—”

“Don’t pretend at that with me, Robin, I’m not in the mood.  You saved our  _ be _ hinds back there and you know it, so quit trying to make this about you.”  Macy put a hand over her mouth, then took it out sputtering when she got a mouthful of rooty hilt.  “Did I say that out loud?”

“Yeah, you did.”  Robin hung zhir head, a gesture which made less of an impression when that wasn’t where zhir mouth was.  “I have to say, I’m impressed at this new side of you?”

“What side?  I don’t have any sides.  I’m perfectly smooth! I sand myself every day when I’m not stuck in the middle of the wilderness.”

“Now it’s my turn to be indignant that you’re feigning ignorance.”  Robin jovially swatted Macy’s sword hand with zhir tail. “I just wanted to say that you’re gonna make a really fun teenager.”

“Robin, you dillweed.”  Macy didn’t even try to stop that one.  “You aren’t taking this seriously!”

“Relax.  HW and I discussed that possibility when she first noticed the disturbances earlier today.  We decided that if it were a trap, it would have been something designed to  _ encourage _ us to go forward.  Not, ya know, something that she has only ever waited out before.”

“I guess that sounds reasonable.”  Macy still believed the timing was some sort of trick, but she had to concede that it was at the very least an odd choice for a trap.  Nevertheless, she glanced around nervously, scrutinizing every tangle of the blooming holly bushes they were tunneling through. She sniffed at the air, wary of anything suspicious mingling with the smells of decay and sap and fear.  She listened, as difficult as it was with the rustling of branches. She kept a measured pace, even as her mentor seemed eager to hurry.

_ Wait, holly?  Most of the bushes we’ve seen up until now have been bramble. _   “Huntress Wizard, the plants—”

She didn’t have time to finish that sentence before a vine lashed around her newly-healed leg.  Letting go of Robin’s tail, she took her sword in both hands and chopped it off, tugging her arms away from more barky tendrils before vaulting off her sword into a nearby tree.  As she grabbed a protruding limb, she yanked the Root Sword out of the ground with her foot and caught it in her right hand, fending off tendrils of holly as she scanned the forest floor for her friends.

Almost directly below her, Robin wasn’t faring nearly as well.  The rainicorn-dog had been pinned to the ground almost immediately.  The bushes around her were beginning to form into the shapes of leafy warriors, pressing zhir to the ground with whiplike weapons.  The largest wielded a large shillelagh, which it brought down right onto where Robin’s head was, but zhe managed to stretch away from the blow.

Glancing ahead, Macy expected to see HW faring better against their efflorescent aggressors.  Instead, the huntress had been ensnared in a net of glowing vines and was being hauled off by another holly construct.  She tried to hack away at the net, but her handaxe had lost its aura and was ineffectual. A second later, the shillelagh-wielder followed, carrying Robin in a similar bag; the rainicorn concentrated but seemed unable to shapeshift out of the openings in the net like zhe normally would.  Macy realized that zhir semi-invisibility enchantment was gone as well.

A lash to the shoulder made the nut remember to defend herself.  Her reflexes were slowed due to needing to fight with her non-dominant hand, so despite the weakness of the tendrils it took her several minutes of wild swinging to drive them off her.  By that point she had long since lost track of where the others had been taken. The remaining holly warriors were gone, along with the bushes, and there didn’t even appear to be a trail to follow.

Luckily, Macy’s keen eye spotted something in the strangely undisturbed dirt where Huntress Wizard had been subdued.  She leapt out of the tree, landing on her face so as not to injure her leg, and went over to inspect it.

It was Huntress Wizard’s cloak and clasp.  As soon as she saw them, Macy’s mind registered the gravity of the situation for the first time.  A horrid guilt and terror and hopelessness and pain commingled inside of her, a boiling cauldron of despair.  She fell to her knees and shouted, for she could do nothing else. She’d been to slow to warn them, too hesitant to speak up.  Now they were gone, and Razz would never get to — this was too much. Her nut heart beat fast and faint. Her breath came out in pixels.  Time wasn’t.

Macy found herself back in that terrible embassy, following Cash, Robin, and Pen into the office of Ambassador Blondie.  For some reason, she stepped through the door. On the other side, Bandit Princess held a sai through the head of Huntress Wizard, who was bound in holly chains.  The murderer turned to look at Macy, her emerald eyes gleaming with hate and magic.

“Focus, Macy,” hissed Bandit Princess, and then Macy was thrust back into reality.

Hands rembling, she lifted the cloak.  On the underside was scrawled what she presumed to be a hasty message for her.   _ “Take it.  Find the source.” _

Gritting her nut teeth, she set the pinecone clasp in front of her with a click.  She could feel a sensation of purpose fill her, not driving out her grief but counterbalancing it.  “Don’t worry, master. I will.”

* * *

“She has,” said Huntress Wizard.

She and Robin were locked in separate gilded cages, in a part of the forest the huntress had never seen before and was quite certain hadn’t existed.  All around them holly beasts shambled, moving around sacred stones and tending to other cages. Monsters of all sorts were captured here — clockbreds, wyrmlings, zombie oozes, even golden owlbats.  Most of the dangerous creatures in the forest were represented here, along with some neither HW nor Robin recognized, such as a strange, hunchbacked blue creature with a multitude of eyes and batlike wings and something that resembled a hundred-armed ogre.

“You can feel that?” whispered Robin.  “Even with the cage blocking your magic?”

“These kinds of barriers have no effect on sympathetic magic.  I can detect my cloak easily enough, so hopefully once she’s done with the mission Macy will be able to trace it back to me.”

“She will,” Robin promised.  “That kid’s somethin’ else, I tells ya.”

“Ya tells me a lot of things.”

A beat.  “Listen, HW, I know it’s not my place, but I think you should—”

Just then a figure appeared in the center, in a whirlwind of leaves, cutting Robin off.  The leaves gathered into a green silhouette, which colored in to become a tall, olive-skinned humanoid in green leafy robes which resembled a nightgown.  In his hands he held a large oaken staff, knotted at the top. His eyes, skittish and set with dark bags, scanned the clearing of cages as he mumbled inventory to himself.

Huntress Wizard tucked into her green tunic like a turtle and hobbled over to the corner of her cage.  Only her tree antlers betrayed the fact that she was anything other than a pile of clothes — or she hoped so, at any rate.  Why was  _ he _ here?

“Excellent work, my holly warriors,” announced Forest Wizard, spreading his hand, as the plant constructs knelt around him.  “You have done fabulously in gathering the creatures of the forest for interrogation.” He inflected his voice oddly on the word ‘interrogation’, rolling the r and drawing out the n.  “Soon we shall discover who is disrupting the grass dragon’s plans to disrupt the forest’s ecosystem.”

The shillelagh-bearer, obviously the leader if these creatures were sentient enough to have one, stepped forward and addressed Forest Wizard.  It spoke in stilted Botanese, a language composed entirely of creaking and rustling. “<Trap find good attack,>” it said, pointing past FW’s shoulder at Huntress Wizard’s cage.  “<Think sabotage hunter wizard.>”

HW cringed.  She hadn’t wanted Forest Wizard to realize she was here, so she was hoping he hadn’t learned how to give his holly warriors the ability to speak.  Evidently, that hope was sunk.  _ Of rotting course. _

“What?”  FW looked indignant, even from behind.  “Of course I wasn’t the saboteur. As much as I want to protect the balance of nature, I can’t exactly betray the grass dragon at this stage.  Besides, I still kinda want that ultimate power.”

She let out an internal sigh of relief.  At least he hadn’t gotten any smarter since the last time she’d seen him.

“Well, since you literally-brainless lichen scaffolds didn’t manage to solve this since the last time I checked in, it’s time for another round of interrogations.  Meet me at the dragon’s roost and bring me that one, that one, and that one.” He pointed at three seemingly-random cages and then leapt into the air, where leaves formed a carpet below him and carried him off deeper into the forest.

As Shillelagh facefronded and the other holly warriors began gathering up the selected cages, Huntress Wizard came out of her tunic and flopped onto her back.  She was so panicked her brain was misinterpreting it as excitement. A weak chuckle escaped her lips.

“Hey, HW,” came Robin’s voice from the adjacent cage.  “Mind filling me in on what all that was about?”

She sat up, instantly sobered.  “Forest Wizard. He was my old mentor.  Taught me everything I know, except for what I learned on my own, and even that I ultimately owe to him for teaching me how to figure it out.  I haven’t talked to him since the Ron James incident, when he tried to reconnect with me on the grounds that we’d both gotten banned from Wizard City.”

Zhe tilted zhir head.  “Wait, why were y’all banned from Wizard City?”

“That’s not important right now.  I don’t know why he’s here, but it sounds like he’s been offered a reward large enough for him to ignore all his principles to help maintain the lack of balance in the forest, which means we’re up against a very powerful force.”  She sighed. “I wish I could say I was surprised.”

“Surprised about which?  The powerful force, or your old mentor being involved?”

She didn’t respond.

“Anyway, as I was saying earlier, I think you should—”

* * *

Macy threw her hands up in frustration and collapsed onto the ground.  She had scoured the area for ten minutes and uncovered no additional clues as to where her friends had been taken.  The exposed dirt where the disappearing holly had been yielded nothing, and it didn’t extend far enough in any direction for Macy to determine whence the anomalous bushes may have come.  None of the trees seemed to have broken branches. Even if she could recall what direction the holly warriors had been walking, she couldn’t assume they had taken a straight line.

At the sounds of distant hoofsteps, Macy dove behind a tree and covered herself with her master’s cloak.  It reeked of sweat and lavender. She held her breath as the sound drew closer, revealing itself to be a fleeing stampede of heck deer.  As they ran past, leaping over fallen logs and trampling wildflowers, they kicked up a storm of dust behind them; Macy had to shield her eyes with the cloak.

She focused on the stinging of her eyes in the self-imposed darkness to recenter her mind.  She had a task to do, and that task wasn’t to find HW — it was to find “the source.” And now she had a lead for where that was.

When the sound of the stampede began to dim, Macy stood up and gazed down the trail whence the deer came.  The dust was suspended in the air like so many miniscule marionettes. Still holding the cloak in front of her face, she braced herself against the harsh smell of the dirt and ran.

Stealth was no longer a concern; she knew that something knew she was here.  All she needed to do was be quick enough to not wind up dead. She was no longer thinking of herself  _ or _ her friends.  She was an agent of balance, a pro-body about to body this imbalance like a pro, and any threat to herself was precisely as bad as it was threatening to her mission.

Vague silhouettes obscured by dust began to clarify in her mind’s eye.  She saw the path she must take laid bare before her, the trail of destruction left by the heck deer becoming distinguishable from the general chaos of a forest in panic.  She knew exactly where to duck to take long, deep breaths before charging forward once more. Her motions became regular, rhythmic, unconscious. Vine curtains were swept aside by the breeze just before she ran through.  Brooks had fordable sections a few paces upstream. No roots or boulders littering the forest floor tripped her or caused her to stumble.

As she advanced, and as the trail went cold, she picked up new trails from new panicking herds — winged possums, carnivorous butterflies, twisted souls.  She saw the version of the forest they saw, a place which was once plentiful if dangerous but which now was being actively destroyed. She felt the desires of each panicking mosquito, each retreating sphinx, each cowed and humbled gladiator spirit, resonating within her —  _ Find the source.  End this. _   She stayed out of the line of sight of the fleeing creatures, but she knew that if she locked eyes with any one of them, there would be a spark of intelligence in their eyes, an intelligence they were borrowing just as she borrowed their animal instinct; they would give her a knowing nod, and in that nod they would pass on to her the courage and determination they could not use.

They probably would also have warned her not to run straight into a massive fir tree, causing a hail of needles and pinecones to pelt her as she lay dazed on the forest floor.

* * *

“…and now she’s lying dazed on the forest floor,” sighed Huntress Wizard from the next cell over.  “Well, I can’t say we didn’t try, but it looks like this is probably the end.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Robin said.  Zhe tried to shift zhir head into an imitation of HW’s, momentarily forgetting about the magic-blocking cage she was trapped in, and ended up just giving zhirself a crick in the neck instead.  “She’ll — ow! — still pull through for us. She’s a tough — ow—”

“—genus,” finished the despondent goblin.  She retreated once more into her tunic and muttered, “I know all about tough nuts.”

_ Well, I was going to say “tough cookie,” but that one probably makes more sense. _   “What  _ do _ you know about them?”

“I know that nature never puts a hard shell around something unless that something is soft.  Despite her talent, despite the prophecy, Macy’s untested. I don’t know how this day is supposed to end in victory.  In the game of predator and prey, we’ve become the prey, and once prey is caught, it rarely ends well for them.”

“Right, yeah.  Um, about the prophecy.”  Robin wasn’t sure if zhe wanted to say this next part.  Once zhe put the idea out there, zhe’d have to confront its truth, and that was a whole different thing from just knowing it.

“Yes?” prompted HW, poking her head out of her tunic collar in a move that looked way too adorable for someone so mysterious.

“You never responded to my suggestion earlier.”   _ Best subject change in the history of bad subject changes. _

“What suggestion?”

“That you should talk to your girlfriend about what your priorities are.”  Robin gestured around with zhir sadly non-stretchy foreleg. “This was clearly part of your calculations for today.  This was something you expected could happen, even with all the precautions you were taking against it.” Zhe stared into Huntress Wizard’s green, catlike eyes, wide and round with emotion, until zhe could see zhir own ruby peepers reflected.  Zhe blew on them, making her blink. “I don’t think Razz had the same idea.”

She rubbed leaf dust out of her eyes.  “Is now really the time to be talking about my romantic life?”

“I don’t see why not; I’ve got a captive audience, after all.”

HW glared at Robin so hard zhe passed out immediately.

* * *

On the other side of consciousness, in that black void between thought and dream, Charlie had imagined a table and chair and was playing solitaire.  A snowglobe with a pyramid inside sat on the corner of the table. “Hey, Binny,” she said without looking up. “I was wondering when you’d stop by.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Robin admitted.  Zhe looked around; there weren’t any stray thoughts floating about like there usually were.  “Did you tidy up my room while I was out?”

“If I did it while you were out, wouldn’t that mean while you were here?”

“I don’t… What’s going on?”

“Solitaire.”  She reached through the glass of the snowglobe inside the pyramid and pulled out another folding chair, setting it up opposite her.  “Want to join?”

“Sure.”  Zhe sat down.

Charlie immediately flipped the table over; the snowglobe crashed into Robin’s head, and with a sound like glass shattering the two of them were in a hot stone room with a window overlooking a snowy desert.  The solitaire game was in perfect condition on a woven rug in the center of the floor, despite a mummy passing a crystal-powered vacuum over it.

“Too bad!” shouted Charlie.  “This is the worst possible time for you to be taking a break.  Your friend needs you!”

“But what can I do?  That stupid cage is blocking all my powers.”

Charlie gestured to the room around them, which was now a hospital room.  The snowglobe was on a table beside Charlie’s unconscious body, and the solitaire game was laid out across her chest.  “Then how do you explain this?”

“Oh, right, those powers.”

“Listen, Robin.”  She put her paw on zhir shoulder; it felt cold.  “I know what it’s like to trap yourself in a pit of aloofness.  It’s easy to curate those you care for, and as a result end up isolating yourself.  Hell, I moved to the other side of the world just to get away from people.”

“What’s hell?”

“Oh, that’s just a concept from some writings I found preserved in a 21st-century bunker; don’t fret about it.  What I’m getting at is you’ve got to learn how to care for others for yourself and not just for others.”

“Huh?”

“Just go.”

Robin walked out the door, concentrating on zhir connection to Macy.  The hospital hallway became the under-construction Candy Kingdom Superhighway as soon as zhe walked out the door.  Zhir half-bear cousin Bronwyn skated past, giving zhir a high-speed high-five before grinding down the guardrail to the annoyance of her father, the incredibly long Kim Kil Whan, who was wearing a pink hard hat and visibility vest over his bespoke suit.

_ Moving on. _   Robin could sense the dreamworld grow more unstable to the south, which meant that was where the dreamer — Macy — was.  Zhe headed that way, noticing the highway become less candy and more gravel as zhe traveled. Before it completed the transition, zhe saw Macy curled in the center of the road as some figure loomed above her.   _ There we go. _

As Robin approached, zhe could more clearly make out the scene.  Macy had her new sword in her hand, but it looked like she couldn’t lift it; moreover, its hilt roots were wrapped around her wrist and appeared to be digging into it.  She had a terrified expression in the one eye Robin could see as she rocked back and forth, mumbling to herself. She was staring up at a large sign creature menacing her; on its front was a blue shield with the number “384” printed on it in white.

Oh.

“Macy!”  Robin shouted, rushing over.  Zhe had to get her away from here, zhe had to do something.  The nut turned toward her, snot dripping from her weirdly visible nose.  The facsimile of the foreign facial feature reminded Robin that zhe was in a dream, so zhe lowered zhir head, charged zhir horn, and blasted the sign with neon sprinkle magic until it was no more than a twinkle in the sky.

“Robin!”  Macy ran over and hugged zhir, sobbing.  “I’m so glad you saved me. I was so scared.”  Then she grabbed Robin’s shoulders and held zhir at arm’s length, staring directly into zhir eyes.  “Hold up, since when could you do that?” she asked, skilting.

“I can’t,” answered Robin.  “As fun as it would be to pretend that I’ve secretly had this ability all along, you need to wake up.  We’re counting on you, Macy.”

“But what if this happens again?”  Her shell looked like it was about to crack.

Robin pulled a roll of duct tape out of metaphor and sealed up her friend’s fracture.  “Then I’ll be here waiting, to give you strength.”

“You really shouldn’t make your whole existence revolve around me like that.”

“I’m not doing this for you.  I’m doing this for me. Because  _ I _ want to do this for you.”

Macy chuckled.  “How selfish of you.”  Then the universe vanished as she awoke.

* * *

The next time Macy called on the spirit of the forest to help navigate, it was different.  Sure, she could still feel her soul resonating with the willpower and perspective of all the panicking creatures around her, and she could still see through a thousand disparate eyes, but those sensations were much duller.  In their place, she could feel the paw of Robin nudging her onward, gesturing for her to duck behind this tree, avoid that bush, watch out for those birds because they can shoot poisoned spears from their mouths and that’s just nasty.  Any time she felt her mind drift off, she would hear Robin whispering something incomprehensible in her ear slit, and the act of straining to hear it would be the truss bracing her awareness.

It was thus that, before long, she found herself at a ravaged ash grove, permeated with an acrid stench.  By this time she had stopped passing by other creatures, which she supposed made sense, but the resulting quiet was unnerving.  The grove itself was the quietest place yet; she —  _ she _  — could hear the hum of magic from the massive standing stones placed seemingly at random between the blasted stumps.  No, not blasted. Crouching behind a particularly large one (just in case the clearing wasn’t actually empty), she got a good look at its surface.  These trees were clearly smashed off, then singed with some manner of acid.

Her trepidations turned out to be justified when a heap of grass in the middle of the grove, which she had assumed to be a small hill, stood up on muscular legs.  A pair of leaves on either side parted to reveal a set of wild, hateful eyes, two black orbs without pupils which were set too close together. As it rose, the shape of its massive, tapering body becoming more apparent, it opened up the front of its face to reveal rows of massive green teeth.  Flecks of acid sprayed across the clearing; one hit a patch of grass beside Macy’s stump and began sizzling, nearly making her jump back. The beast let out a massive roar, then with a lumbering leap it took to the air and began a slow upward corkscrew.

“The grass dragon,” Robin said in awe.  For the moment Macy pretended that her friend would not have done that if zhe weren’t technically a figment of her imagination right now.  “That thing could probably wrap around Castle Jugland twice over.” Zhe turned zhir illusory head toward Macy, a stupid grin on zhir face. “Wanna try an’ ride it?”

Macy gestured for Robin to get down, which really just meant,  _ stop distracting me. _   The dragon wasn’t leaving the clearing; it entered and maintained a two-layer figure eight flight pattern above the clearing.  She wondered if this was meant to symbolize the double infinities of nature — the endless arrow of time and the endless permanence of death — but decided it probably just meant this was the only way the dragon would fit above the clearing.  She guessed it was waiting for something, or perhaps someone.

She got her answer mere moments later, as a horn-bearing holly warrior stepped into the grove and tooted a short fanfare ahead of a small procession.  There were four more holly warriors, walking in a square formation, with a Forest Wizard she didn’t recognize in the middle sitting on a flying leaf carpet.  “Noble dragon,” he said in a casual tone which one would not typically use to refer to a noble dragon, “I come with more news or something.”

Although the dragon failed to respond with anything except unintelligible screeching, FW apparently took this as a cue to elaborate.  “We have made great progress in determining the identity of whatever heathen was so rude as to wake you from your slumber. By which I mean, we have determined that a great many creatures were not responsible for it.”  More screeching. “Well, of  _ course _ I banished them anyway.  What do you take me for, some kind of principled individual?”  A shorter screech, grossly uninflected. “Well, that’s just uncalled for.”

This went on for some time, in a much less informative manner than Macy would have preferred.  As it turns out, two people who both know a piece of information aren’t likely to say it aloud to each other unprompted, regardless of whether someone else is seeking that information out and especially if that someone doesn’t know what that information could be.  Instead, Macy used the opportunity to once again try seeing through the eyes of the forest, this time rubbing the pinecone clasp of HW’s cloak with her fingers and focusing on that tactile sensation.

Instantly a memory filled her head of her walking a path she’d never walked before, returning to a place she had never been.  As she suspected, it was in the direction the Forest Wizard had come from, and at the end was ‘home’. She took off the cloak and handed it to Robin.  “Go that way,” she whispered, pointing in as subtle a manner as possible so as not to attract the attention of the dragon who definitely could see her but was seemingly choosing to ignore her.

“How will that help?” Robin whispered back, confirming Macy’s earlier suspicion that zhir volume moderation was not ruled by any kind of situational awareness.  “The two of us are trapped in anti-magic cages. Also, how am I holding this?”

“Since you’re projecting into my mind through my subconscious, you have access to my relationship with Huntress Wizard, with this cloak serving as a tangible manifestation of that.  As a result, you are exerting a power that comes from my feelings for her as well as her feelings for that cloak, which is evidently at least strong enough to allow you limited access to the material world  _ through _ the cloak.”

“Er, how do you know all that?”

Macy shrugged.  “I made it up on the spot, but it sounds right.”

“Welp, that certainly fills  _ me _ with confidence.”  Zhe began putting on the cloak.  “I’m going to go use a power neither of us understands to attempt to break a powerful huntress out of a trap she can’t escape designed by the person who taught her how to be a huntress; you stay here and slay a massive dragon with two weapons you barely know how to use and a power you can only access a tiny part of.”

“Right.”  Macy nodded, ever so slightly.  “Let’s test fortune’s mood.”

Robin finished donning the cloak and then snuck around the outside of the clearing while Macy started rifling through her backpack.  There was something in here that she figured she could use to aid her, if only she could get a chance to use it. Unfortunately, trying not to make too much noise meant slow going, and she wasn’t able to find it before FW said something that sounded suspiciously like, “Alright, I’ll  _ leaf _ you alone for now,” and the grass dragon began descending.  Macy looked up, one hand still in her backpack, to see that the dragon’s eyes were locked firmly on her.

“Crap,” she muttered.   _ I forgot to ask Robin what zhe meant by ‘the person who taught her how to be a huntress.’ _

* * *

To Huntress Wizard, it looked like her cloak was fluttering all on its own.

This on its own was not a surprising sight to her.  While none of her cloaks were truly sentient, those of a magical persuasion often granted limited animacy to their possessions for conveninces’ sake, especially those possessions which held sentimental value and thus were already magically linked, and the huntress was no exception.  She often had her cloak clasp and unclasp on its own, and it even had a spot in the rafters where it liked to sleep.

Generally, this required some will on HW’s end, even if only to give it directives — lacking true sentience, it would not take action of its own initiative — but even this alone would not be enough to cause worry.  Many times, her cloak would operate on the level of the subconscious, doing things which she on some level wanted it to do but which hadn’t quite risen to the level of mental commands. Once, she had embarrassed Finn at a dinner party with his brothers Jake & Jermaine when her cloak had, seemingly of its own accord, reached out and zipped up his fly.  While she would have been impressed that it had enough energy, she wouldn’t necessarily have been surprised if it had simply acted on her subconscious desire for freedom and come to unlock her cage.

No, the surprising thing was that her cloak was opening Robin’s cage first.

As soon as the cage was open, a high-pitched hum Huntress Wizard hadn’t noticed became somewhat quieter.  Robin woke up and dashed outside just as HW’s cloak fell to the ground, letting it clasp around zhir again as she set to work on the latch mechanism for the huntress’s cage.

“I’m going to assume this is somehow attributable to Macy coming through,” said Huntress Wizard as the door clicked open and the hum died down significantly; she wasted no time stepping out, breathing in the scent of magic once again.

“Essentially, yeah,” replied Robin.  Then zhe unceremoniously pushed HW back into her cage, knocking the air out of her lungs, and pushed the door into an almost-closed position.

Wheezing, she asked, “What was that for?”  Then when the oxygen hit her brain again and she saw Robin closing the door on zhir own cage, she realized the answer was obvious.  Her expression went serious, and she retreated back into her tunic. It was somewhat flimsy and coarse, and it provided little in the way of protection, but the warmth made her happy in contrast to the coldness in her stomach.  “He’s coming back.”

As if on cue, Forest Wizard flew in on his leaf carpet, surrounded by his retinue of holly warriors.  “Well, that was a disaster,” he complained as the leaves dispersed. “All these sacrifices better really amp up my magic mojo, otherwise this whole dragon business was a waste of time.  Asking me to sacrifice the stability of a forest is one thing, but to sacrifice the individual animals  _ in _ that forest?  Now that’s just tedious.”

Huntress Wizard felt her heart sink.  Had her old master really fallen so far?  Worse, how much damage had he caused — knowingly and deliberately — while she waited, content to investigate after the fact, refusing to act?  She felt a tug at her very soul, as if the forest itself were being dragged into the land of the dead and would drag her along with it. Rage and regret filled her in equal measure.  She closed her eyes and sniffed deeply the dank, salty smell of the inside of her tunic. She had to remember her predicament.

“<Dragon appear not wait,>” rustled Shillelagh.

“I’m not surprised,” replied FW, walking over to the cage with the strange blue creature.  “Getting woken up early must have been quite the spooker’s-cube. I’d imagine it doesn’t want that to happen again.  I’ll probably only have time to get one more interrogation in before it insists on setting out for a new napping spot.”  He pointed at his holly retinue. “Take this guy to the portal. I’ve been saving the best for last, but we’ll probably have to kill everyone else after this anyway.  I’ll go on ahead to prepare things.”

And with a swing of his staff, the leaf carpet was carrying him on his way again.

While the holly warriors hoisted the selected cage, HW took advantage of the distraction to come out of her own cage once again, Robin following close behind.  She allowed herself one moment to simply relish the returning connection to nature’s pulsing harmony. Then she turned to Robin and held out her hand; reluctantly, the rainicorn-dog took off the cloak and handed it back to her.

The two worked in perfect sync.  Robin reapplied zhir cloaking enchantment, and then the two swiftly climbed into the trees.  Zhe gently lowered Huntress Wizard down onto the cage, while she set about the delicate work of carving a new door in the top with her enchanted axe without alerting the inattentive holly procession to her activities.  All the while Robin kept a ruby eye out for suspicious activity around them.

Eventually she was able to remove enough bars for the blue creature to climb out the top.  “Get out of here,” she whispered, not knowing if it were capable of understanding her. “You’re safe now.”

With a nod and a wink, it slithered away into the forest, leaving the goblin with the distinct impression she was missing something.  If she had the opportunity, she would have covertly asked Robin whether zhe felt the same way, and through her answer would have learned something very important about that blue creature — or at the very least, discovered a piece of information which would have pointed her in the right direction.  Unfortunately, she was interrupted by an irate voice from the front of the caravan.

Forest Wizard was standing on his leafy flying carpet, raising his staff in frustration,in front of a prostrate Shillelagh; the wizard’s brows were so furrowed they looked like a wedge splitting his face apart.  “What are you rotting lichen scaffolds doing!?” he bellowed. “First you take  _ far _ too long to deliver the cage, and now when I come to check up on you, I find that you’ve let it go?  And on top of all that—” He broke off when he saw Huntress Wizard; then his expression grew even angrier.  “You! A student of mine, yet you stand against me? Holly warriors, destroy her!”

She was ready this time.  As the cage-bearers leapt up to try to entangle her once more, she held out her handaxe and hummed the melody of the forest.  Her voice formed a perfect harmony with the ambient sounds of wind and leaves, and the yellow aura on her handaxe grew ten times brighter.  It took on a weight that was not physical but emotional — her arm felt like it was holding up twenty untainted coward’s sunsets over mountainous vistas, fifty freshly-brewed cups of tea shared in the fragrant evening air with loved ones in fields of golden flowers, a hundred tiny smiles on bad days that made those days worth living through.

Then she swung her axe in a great circle and all those memories were flung from her mind, leaving her with the feeling of raw power and purpose that could only come from being a pro-body.  Two of the holly warriors were cleanly bisected, collapsing into useless piles of twigs which fell through the cage roof; the other two managed to leap back on time to only suffer critical damage to the chest.  Shillelagh, down below, seemed visibly wilted.

Huntress Wizard locked eyes with Forest Wizard, who for his part was equal parts infuriated and offended.  “You won’t take me by surprise a second time, Master Forest,” she spat. “I’ve let you go unchecked for too long.  It’s time to fix that.”

“You’ll fix that over my dead body!” FW shouted back, gripping his staff with two hands as leaves swirled around him once more.  “Except you won’t, because your body will be the one that’s dead!”

Between that and HW’s fierce weapon, Robin knew an exit cue when zhe saw one.  Not wanting to leave zhir old friend in a pickle, zhe darted off in the direction of the ravaged field; not wanting to leave zhir new friend after utterly failing as her lookout, zhe immediately paused and turned back to face the holly warriors.  “Come and get me!” zhe shouted, dropping the cloaking enchantment once more to free up however much magic zhe had left. “I’m gonna go disrupt all y’alls’ plans!”

Through some miracle, the holly warriors took the bait and started running after zhir with surprising agility.  Suddenly much less confident about zhir lack of plan, Robin began running through the forest, glancing back every five seconds to confirm that, yes, zhe was still slowly losing ground.  Hopefully zhe could reach the grove soon, so that the warriors could team up with the dragon to more efficiently kill zhir and Macy.  _ Wait, no, that’s a terrible plan. _   Lacking a better one, though, zhe kept running.

Suddenly the blue creature from before leapt out of a tree and slammed an enormous fist into the frontmost holly warrior; as they lifted the fist and shrunk it back to normal weird-blue-creature fist size, flecks of the broken warrior were scattered in all directions. The blue creature turned to Robin and gave zhir a thumbs-up, their five eyes set with determination.  “I’ve got this,” they said in a strange familiar voice. “You go help Macy while I hold them off.”

“How does a shapeshifting alien know Macy’s name?” asked Robin, tilting zhir head quizzically.  “I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if you knew  _ my _ name, since you’re probably related to me somehow, but—”

“Not the time,” snapped the shapeshifter, expanding their torso into a wall to delay the holly warriors.  “Go!”

Robin went, and before zhe knew it zhe was back at the ravaged grove.  Macy was hiding behind a different stump than before as the grass dragon spat acid in her direction while barreling toward her.  When its breath let up, she vaulted over the stump and sliced at the dragon’s underbelly with her axe. The beast howled in pain and turned toward her once more.  By the time it started spitting acid again, she was behind a different stump. Based on the acrid smell, this cycle had been repeating for a while.

“Macy!” shouted Robin.  This had the effect of causing the grass dragon to immediately divert course and charge straight toward Robin.  Panic welled up inside zhir. Zhir nerves said to flee, but zhir muscles refused to move. Not for the first time, zhe wished zhe were capable of shooting rainbow-sprinkle energy like zhir grandnanny, or even regular sprinkles.  At this point, she could even go for just  _ having _ some sprinkles to eat.  The sugar might calm zhir nerves.  A good kick of sugar never failed to get zhir in a good mood.  Idly, zhe wondered if this was what Macy felt like all the time.

“Robin!” shouted Macy, jolting the rainicorn-dog back to reality at about three meters away from death.  A desperate idea came to her that, when telling the story later, zhe would invariably claim zhe did on purpose.  Zhe funneled all the magic in zhir body into zhir horn, desaturating her color palette, and let burst forth a light show — an  _ illusion _ of combat-grade rainbow sprinkles.

For the second time in as many minutes, the unpracticed ruse worked.  The dragon dodged out of the way of the apparent attack, scraping its side against a particularly tall tree stump.  On the other side of it, Macy pulled something from her backpack. She was beaming with joy as she held it aloft. From this distance Robin couldn’t quite tell what it was.

Macy had pulled out the flare gun Finn had given her at the Life-Sized Miniature Golf Invitationals.  She now held it by the side of her head like a cop in a pre-Mushroom-War sitcom. Once again, she felt that thrill that seemed to accompany mortal fear.  Though her legs were sore from dashing, her arms were grimy with residue from the stumps, and her nut heart beat faster than the Ice Thing on a drum solo in any Marceline and the #1 Babes song, her excitement outweighed all that.  The stinking air smelled like imminent victory.

She held the gun up just like Finn had shown her.  She could almost feel an echo of his hand on hers. Then she aimed it toward the dragon, shouted, “Eat flare!” and pulled the trigger.

Then she pulled the trigger three more times, grew annoyed, and slapped her forehead, suddenly remembering that the flare had in fact fallen into a river.

“Um, Macy, bad news,” Robin shouted from across the clearing.

“Yeah, I figured that!” hissed Macy as she ducked behind her stump, barely avoiding getting doused in acid.

“No, not that.  Look.” Zhe created an illusory arrow in the air above, and Macy followed its pointing.

At the edge of the clearing stood Shillelagh, its weapon resting on one shoulder, and a net containing a struggling blue creature slung over the other.  It stepped into the ravaged grove and pointed its shillelagh at Robin. As it did so, both it and the dragon emitted loud, melodic rustling noises. Macy didn’t need to understand Botanese to recognize it as a war cry.

* * *

Huntress Wizard jumped up as a kangaroo, dive-bombed as a falcon, and swung her handaxe downward as a goblin, narrowly missing Forest Wizard’s head and sending shockwaves through the air as she tore through his fifth flying carpet.  She rolled with the momentum of the shockwaves as she landed, pushing herself back up with the back of her axe. FW, on the other hand, landed on his back next to a pile of conspicuously-stacked stones a few meters away.

“Let’s see what you’ve been up to,” said HW, flapping her cape as she leapt atop the stone pile with the grace of a gazelle which ran away from its overly strict and proper parents to become a ballet dancer.  Looking around, there were several other similar stone piles, surrounding a whirling vortex of blueset into the ground. She tsked. “Abusing the rite of forest justice? For shame.”

She leapt down on the far side of him as he was still scrambling to stand up, the impact of the ground stinging her feet even through her thick boots.  Ignoring this momentary pain, she raised a foot and kicked the older wizard in the chest, knocking him almost into the portal. “But I guess I should thank you for making my job easier.”

Despite her confidence, the harsh, electrified petrichor wafting from the portal made her nervous.  She didn’t want to get any closer and risk getting pulled in herself, becoming part of the soil. She stopped briefly to exchange her handaxe for a shortbow and draw a single, green-fletched arrow from her quiver.  She drew the arrow back carefully, not wanting to set it off accidentally. Forest Wizard was up but leaning heavily on his staff, clearly dazed, but he still had the presence to mutter arcane words of power between raspy breaths.

Huntress Wizard’s words were faster.  She loosed the arrow and its tip flared a bright green flame as it spun through the air.  The shot was perfect, sailing straight into the middle of her opponent’s chest. Then it sailed the rest of the way through as FW’s body exploded into a pile of leaves.   _ Wait, that’s not what usually— _

HW barely had time to process the deception before a belch of green fire erupted from the portal, presumably in retaliation for her arrow.  She instinctively raised her arms to shield her face, but the flames surrounded and engulfed the rest of her body. Searing pain consumed every exposed surface of skin on her body.  She tried to use her cloak to put out the parts of her body that were on fire, but she couldn’t concentrate through the pain or the stinging fog long enough to determine which parts those were.

Forest Wizard decided to use that opportunity to clock her on the head with a big rock.  She collapsed onto the ground pretty quickly, whereupon, having stopped and dropped, she realized all she had left to do was roll.  She fought through the muddying redness miring her mind to commune with the grass under FW’s feet. Based on the pained yelp he let out, he must have tripped and hit himself on the head with the rock as soon as she did that.

Despite burns and aches on every part of her body and  a warm trickle under her leafy hair, the adrenaline coursing through Huntress Wizard’s system and the willpower of the forest itself allowed her to clear her head.  She morphed into a roc and, with her three-meter wingspan, fanned away the smoke. She then morphed back to goblin form and commanded the fire to retreat. Forest Wizard, dazed from his self-inflicted head injury, stumbled backwards from the force of the breeze.  He tripped over a stone and began wobbling at the cusp of the portal. It seemed like he was about to fall in, saving HW a lot of trouble, but then he raised his staff and a breeze pushed him back upright.

_ That probably won’t work; it’s time to switch targets. _   Huntress Wizard dashed over to one of the other stone piles and swiped at it with her axe.  The entire tower fell comically fast with a satisfying clattering sound. Judging from FW’s horrified expression, this was a good choice.  He started throwing maple leaves like throwing stars, but at this distance she was moving too fast for him to hit her, and she was able to destroy the other piles with ease.

When she hit the one closest to him, her axe didn’t even get all the way through it before the portal lost stability and exploded, sending her flying into a nearby tree.  It didn’t hurt quite as much as being set on fire, but she still wouldn’t recommend it. She felt a splinter jam into her back through her cloak and tunic, which besides being painful was simply impressive on the splinter’s part and she would have been remiss not to acknowledge that.  Overall she gave the experience two stars out of five.

This time, Forest Wizard seemed to have been the one to take the shockwave better, as he was standing on his own power with not many more bruises than before.  “You ungrateful whelp!” he shouted, snarling. He held his staff between his hands as if practicing to be a limbo bar, then charged forward, slamming the staff into HW’s shoulders so hard she broke clean through the tree and was slammed into the next one.

Then out of nowhere a very desaturated Robin body-slammed FW, making the wizard drop his staff.  Hissing like a feral cat, he conjured a sixth, much smaller leaf carpet and flew away, mumbling something that was probably a promise of vengeance Huntress Wizard couldn’t hear over the ringing in her ears.

HW felt spindly arms haul her slack body upright into a sitting position.  She held her head, feeling something warm and sticky beneath her leafy hair.   _ Once my brain finally registers the pain from that, today will officially blow. _   “Ugh…” she moaned, her throat still sore from the smoke.  “Macy, is that you?”

“Yep.”  Even frizz-frazzled and out of breath, Macy’s voice still had too much energy for Huntress Wizard’s oncoming headache.  She recoiled, squeezing the side of her head. When Macy continued, her voice had dropped to a raspy stage whisper. “We beat the dragon, like in your dream.”

“That’s not — I — urgh.”   _ There’s the pain. _   “Let’s get back to Razz so she can heal me up.  Us up.” She fumbled around, fighting her blurring vision, until her hand clasped around Forest Wizard’s staff.  Leaning heavily against it, she slowly and shakily stood up; the bulbous front of the staff dug into her chest. She turned around to look at Macy, whose right side was acid-pocked.  “How did you…” That was the last of the breath HW could spare for speech.

“Defeat the dragon?” finished Macy, linking her arm under Huntress Wizard’s shoulder as the trio began the return trip.  “With a little strategy, a little teamwork, and a little help from your boyfriend.”

* * *

Five minutes earlier…

Robin’s axe clanked against zhir opponent’s shillelagh with the disconcertingly out-of-place sound of metal against metal.  The halted momentum of zhir swing reverberated through zhir arms. Zhe was slow to step away and received another thorny knee to the gut.  If zhe had eaten anything since zhe had left the treehouse that morning, zhe probably would have lost it.

Above zhir, there was a botanical cry of pain.  Reflexively, both Robin and Shillelagh looked up, to see that a gash had formed just above the grass dragon’s right eye.  It howled and twisted, writhing in the air like a worm on the hook until something dislodged and was flung far into the horizon.  Based on the pinprick of yellow surrounding it, Macy must have thrown her handaxe. Which meant Robin had to end this fight before she had to do that again.

Robin recovered from zhir distraction a tick faster than Shillelagh.  The rainicorn-dog decided to use this opportunity to charge another illusory attack.  If zhe could get the construct to focus on dodging, then just for a moment there would have to be an opening in its perfect guard.  Ignoring the prickling of the thorns embedded in her fur, zhe recalled all zhir color into zhir horn and let loose a rainbow-sprinkle light show.

Shillelagh did not dodge.  Shillelagh did not attempt to dodge.  Judging from the sheer lack of response on the construct’s part, Shillelagh had been completely aware that there was nothing  _ to _ dodge.  Whether because Robin had neglected some vital light frequency to make the illusion compelling, or simply because it could sense the optical nature of the magic at play, Shillelagh was completely unfazed.

Instead, it swung its shillelagh  _ through _ the light show.  Zhir already poor vision obscured by zhir own attack, Robin didn’t notice this until it was too late.  Zhe flinched zhir head to the side so that the blunt weapon didn’t crack zhir horn, but zhe still took the full brunt of a wallop to the neck.

For several seconds, Robin couldn’t breathe.  Zhe stumbled backwards, tripping over a stump and landing painfully on zhir side.  Zhe saw the silhouette of Shillelagh looming over her, framed by the late afternoon sun, and a chill ran up zhir spine.  Was it merely a cool breeze sweeping through the ravaged grove, or was this the feeling of oncoming death?

Macy bore witness to all of this, and a rage filled her to replace blind panic.  She charged across the field of stumps, yelling louder than she ever thought she could, drawing the attention of both Shillelagh in front of her and the dragon behind her.  Despite the momentary distraction, she knew she wouldn’t reach the holly warrior before it brought its weapon down on her best friend’s skull. Fortunately, she didn’t need to.

Macy heard the rustling behind her which she knew to mean the dragon sharply inhaling.  She leapt into the air several meters away from the pair, twisting in the air so she could look the dragon in the eye.  She issued a silent challenge it had already accepted.

The grass dragon let forth a torrent of acid, pelting Macy’s shell and arm with a horrid sizzling, an even worse stench, and a pain like burning.  As soon as Macy landed face-first on the ground, she took out her water bottle with her non-burning hand and poured its entire remaining contents over her arm in an attempt to wash away the acid before she permanently lost a limb.

Robin had gotten away from that attack relatively unscathed, only getting a few droplets of acid on zhir back.  Thus the pain for zhir was merely excruciating. When they landed zhe cringed and closed zhir eyes reflexively, wishing zhe could breathe so zhe could have a chance to scream in pain before zhe died.

But zhe didn’t die.  After a moment, zhe opened zhir eyes and looked up, only to see something simultaneously horrifying and relieving.  Shillelagh had apparently caught a direct blast of acid to the face and upper torso, dissolving half its body; the other half lay crumpled on the ground next to its dropped weapon.  At the edge of the grove, the still-bagged shapeshifter yelled, “Suck it, ya lichen scaffold!” Despite everything, Robin found that disrespectful.

Macy rushed over to Robin and pulled zhir behind a stump as the dragon flew overhead.  She didn’t even bother trying to get in a swing with the Root Sword. “Are you okay?” she asked.  “Relatively speaking, of course.”

Robin said nothing.  Instead, zhe looked up to the dragon, zhir heard racing.  This wasn’t the heart-race of fear — it had been doing that already.  Fear had a particular smell that zhe could recognize even coming from zhirself; every emotion did.  It wasn’t rage, either. No, Robin’s heart was racing out of  _ indignation. _

“I’ll take that as a yes.  Now, listen.” Macy pulled Robin closer and whispered, as if afraid the acid-scarred stump might be eavesdropping.  “I think I’ve figured out a way to defeat this thing. Can you set things on fire at the ranges the dragon is keeping?”

“I only realized I could set things on fire at all earlier today,” said Robin.  “With that said, I am one hundred percent confident in my ability to do that. Trouble is I don’t think I can do it to anything less flammable than dry grass, and the grass the dragon is made out of is green and vibrant.”

“Not a problem.”  She pulled out a small box from her backpack and took something small and round out of it.  “I can take care of that part.”

She stood up suddenly and dragged Robin away as the dragon’s acid breath scoured their previous position.  She ducked behind another stump, this one half dissolved from repeated scourings. As the acid breath let up, Macy stepped out from behind the stump and hurled the orb at the dragon’s incoming face; it landed just inside the deep gash left by her thrown axe.

It was clear what Robin had to do next.  Even if zhe didn’t know why, zhe trusted Macy.  With zhir last bit of magic power, zhe concentrated the light around the embedded orb, doing zhir best to trace its movements so that it could reach combustion temperature.

When the orb emitted a bright flash of yellow-orange light, Robin figured that had done the trick.  The dragon roared, much deeper than any sound it had made previously, like a thousand trees moaning in agony.  Fires quickly spread through its magical veins until the whole beast glowed from within, a molten tube enclosed in a smoldering grassy shell.  Then there was a massive fireball and a wave of nauseating heat, and the dragon was no more.

When the smoke cleared, the only signs the dragon had ever existed were the acid-cauterized tree stumps, the disintegrated Shillelagh, and a glowing white egg dotted with tiny craters in the exact center of the grove.  With a curiosity bordering on stupidity, an aching Macy walked up to the egg and attempted to pick it up, but her hands passed through it with a disquieting cold feeling. She shivered, from both that and the release of her adrenaline high.

A beat.  “We should probably go help master,” she said.

* * *

On the way back to the treehouse, the party made a detour to examine the ravaged grove once more.  Robin suddenly remembered about the recaptured shapeshifter, but they had apparently escaped on their own.  Zhe told Huntress Wizard what zhe suspected they were — a powerful alien, one of the race from whom Jake (and by extension Robin) got his shapeshifting powers.  HW was too tired to ask followup questions, so she instead set about examining the egg the dragon had dropped. This proved fruitless, however, since she couldn’t detect what kind of magic was responsible for its existence more specifically than “old magic”, which didn’t narrow it down by much.

While she was doing this, Robin dug a shallow grave for Shillelagh, marked with their namesake weapon.  “I didn’t know them,” zhe said by way of a eulogy, “and the only interaction I had with them was trying to kill me.  I don’t know if they had some goodness in their soul, or even if they had one in the first place. But now I never will.  Wherever they are, if they’re anywhere, I hope someone treats ‘em with the dignity they never got a chance to earn.”

They also detoured through the space where all the forest creatures had been kept in cages, but those too were empty, and smashed as well.  Robin guessed the shapeshifter must have come through and freed them. Besides that, the three headed as directly for the treehouse as they reasonably could, not wanting to delay treatment for Huntress Wizard’s concussion.

Razz was understandably annoyed at her girlfriend not honoring her promise to stay safe, but after a long kiss and a whisper Robin pretended not to have overheard to avoid embarrassing the two lovebirds, the berry was suddenly in a much better mood.  She carefully washed all the acid off Macy and Robin’s skin and wrapped HW’s bleeding head in a thick cloth bandage. After admonishing the three of them one final time for recklessness, she congratulated them on saving the forest and invited them into a celebratory hug.

Huntress Wizard offered to let Macy stay another night to recover from her injuries, but at this point Macy didn’t want to stay in the Evil Forest for one second longer than she needed.  She packed her belongings, put on her grey hoodie, and said her goodbyes as politely as possible; then she let herself down the elevator, Robin following right behind, and with an energy reserve she didn’t know she had, ran all the way to the rock-shaped rock at the very edge of the forest, only stopping momentarily so that Robin could recover and re-braid zhir buttons.

“It was nice of them to let you keep the pinecones,” Macy commented, polishing the Root Sword impatiently.  “As well as the axe. Well, that or they just forgot to ask for them back. What are you going to do with them?”

“What?” asked Robin with a crunch, her mouth full of pinecone.

Macy looked away, suddenly queasy.  “Never mind.”

From the rock-shaped rock, Macy and Robin traced their steps past Stupendous Hal’s, through the entrance into the Crystal Dimension, and then back out through the mercury lake into the Valley of Moths.  By then the sun had already set behind the mountains, and the chilly night air with its familiar bouquet of floral and mineral smells was alive with the sounds of insects and birds.

Robin tapped Macy’s shoulder and pointed to the center of the valley; when Macy turned to look, she gasped in awe.  A massive group of green and brown moths was flying overhead, forming an amorphous shape that breathed with the beating of their wings.  They seemed to glow with an eerie iridescence as they reflected the light of the rising gibbous moon, illuminating the forest with twice-stolen sunlight.  For a moment, Macy saw what they valley must look like to them: small and vast all at once, each tree diminished by distance and bathed in faint silver. The colors they saw, the colors Macy saw in that moment, were totally alien, yet she knew them to be beautiful.

Without looking away, she began walking toward Jugland Mesa.  “Come on, Robin,” she whispered. “Let’s go home.”

* * *

“Where should we move next?” asked Razz, packing the last box of fine barkware.  “Should we go back to your old place? Or should we build another one?”

“The old place should work.”  Huntress Wizard was sitting in the couch in her robe with a mug of hot tea in her hands, as she was on strict orders to do.  “Finn’s had Donny keeping it in order, so it should be live-in ready.”

Razz walked over to HW and leaned on the back of the couch behind her.  “Is there something on your mind?”

“The dream,” she replied without turning around.  “That’s what Robin was going to tell me.”

“What about it?  The prophecy was fulfilled.”

“It wasn’t, though.  The prophecy had me being there to do the final blow, not Robin.  Which means this will all happen again.”

“It had better not.”  Razz ruffled Huntress Wizard’s hair.  “Or at the very least, it had better not on such short notice.”

HW laughed, an exhausted but genuine laugh, and leaned her head back to look at her girlfriend upside-down.  “I’ll make sure of it, princess.”

Razz scoffed, making a faux-offended face, and punched Huntress Wizard lightly on the shoulder.  “Quit that, hunnybuns,” she said, struggling to suppress the spreading smile on her face. “You know I’m not a princess anymore.”

HW smiled wider.  “As you wish.”

* * *

In the middle of a ravaged ash grove, a blue shapeshifter examined a glowing white egg patterned like the moon in miniature.  “This seems like a real bad sign,” they said. “All the stuff that’s gonna happen — that  _ already _ happened — is cuzza the battle that took place right here.  I don’t think this egg’s hatched yet, but when it does, whatever weird evil baby comes out’ll probably destroy the world for realsies or somethin’.”

They sighed as their form began to compress into their usual shape, picking up the egg with no problem and tucking it into a flesh-pocket.  “To be honest, I don’t really know why I need to jump through all these hoops when I could be helping you directly. Whatever, you’re the expert I guess for some reason.  See you around, Macy,” said Jake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, that's who that is. That probably would have been a more surprising twist if I'd let there be any time at all between the setup and the reveal. Jake, why did you reveal yourself so early? You're killin' me, smalls. I could have dragged that out at *least* another never. Oh well, I guess now the one and only twist of the story has been revealed and there are no more surprising in store about Jake the Dog and the coin he gave Macy back in Chapter 1.
> 
> I don't know if anyone else will feel the same way, but to be honest? I cried after I wrote Shillelagh's death scene. I didn't expect to; I created them to be discarded, same as FW. Something about it just got to me, though. You can even tell when it happens, because the same thing happens to Robin. That's why I switch from “it” to “them” for like one line, by the way. I've no doubt I've left in some straight-up pronoun mistakes, but that isn't one of them. That's in-character for the narrative.
> 
> There's a lot of stuff in this chapter that I've been wanting to reveal for a while. First of all, yes, the implication is that Razz is in fact the Wildberry Princess from the show. Yes, I will eventually explain how she ended up where she is now. No, it won't be for a while; we're not quite to the point where I can afford to give that much development to Macy's mentor's girlfriend when there are so many other characters (especially Charlie and Pen) left somewhat underexplored. We'll get around to her, though. It's only a matter of time…
> 
> The action scenes in this chapter involved some of the most granular planning I've ever done for this fic. I have tons of stuff planned, don't get me wrong, but most of it is on a broad level. The action scenes here, especially Huntress Wizard versus Forest Wizard, were planned beat by beat before I even started working on them. It's a very helpful process for that kind of scene, but it's not a usual part of my workflow, so working on this chapter was an experience. Between this, a more improvisational action scene in one of the upcoming chapters, and a whole bunch of stuff in between that I did for my much more action-heavy NaNoWriMo project, I think I'm beginning to settle into the flow of how to write that kind of thing, and you can look forward to more of that in the future eventually. Maybe not for a while, at least not to this degree, but eventually.
> 
> The next chapter will be the last in this eight-parter, and like the first, it's a Robin-focused chapter only tangentially connected to the overarching Macy-focused theme. After that, well, we'll be back to a more episodic rhythm for a while as we build towards Macadamia's thirteenth birthday party. I don't think it's fair to call any of it “filler”, but a lot of it is going to be less plot-heavy than this chapter was, and they'll also be way more self-contained on a structural level.
> 
> Speaking of upcoming chapters, here's your preview (take a wild freaking guess which character said it):  
> “I just want to help, alright? Even though there’s no possible way I could be blamed for any of the stuff that’s going on here, there’s a tiny irrational part of my brain that feels the meagerest sliver of an iota of responsibility.”


	11. Spades

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After coming back home to Nut Castle, Macy has a heart-to-heart with her dad while Robin confronts Pen.
> 
> Part 8 of the 8-parter “Flight of Fancy”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end, my friend. This is the end, my only friend, the end. Of “Flight of Fancy”, that is. With Macy already having done her training arc and arrived back at the Duchy of Nuts, it's time to wrap up some loose ends and get some resolution for the events that kicked off this arc, way back during chapter 4. After this, we're back to episodic chapters for a while; this is more the _Steven Universe_ model than Adventure Time, so the episodes will still contribute to the overall character arcs and relevant worldbuilding, but in a less structured way.
> 
> On an unrelated note, in two days, I'll have a Christmas present for all you Homestucks in the audience — I won't tell you what it is, because that's how Christmas presents work, but I will say that it's not like anything else I've published.
> 
> Your discussion topic is: What's a time when you lied to make a situation less awkward, even though if the lie were discovered the situation would become a _lot_ awkwarder?

Captain Amélie Faucher had been praying in her office when she received a call on the emergency line.  She had set up a small shrine to Grob Gob Glob Grod underneath her desk, a simple pedestal of plain cardboard painted with pinks and vermillions, holding a small plastic idol in the shape of the four-faced deity’s legendary helmet.  She was not a religious person, and as such she knew no prayers; instead, she equivocated vague greatnesses attributable to Grob, Gob, Glob, and/or Grod, such as “painting the stars under the sky” and “giving life the gift of pierogies” and other such miracles of cosmic import.  She felt ridiculous saying these things — the quadrifurcate champion of Mars was dead, after all, and they could do nothing even if they heard her prayers. Still, if there were any chance he could intercede with Death on the judgement of Blondie’s soul…

For a selfish moment, she ignored the ringing from the phone in her pocket, the infernal buzzing against her side that made her shell rattle uncomfortably every time some novice guard tried to report a loitering jay or a larcenous magpie.  The world could revolve without her just once, could it not? But she could not in good conscience disrespect the post she had worked so hard to attain. Her past self would never forgive her. Before the phone could buzz a second time, she answered it.

“You’ve reached Captain Mél, she/they,” she said automatically as soon as the phone was up to her ear.  Then she immediately felt the blood flowing to her ear slits; anyone who had access to her  _ emergency _ number would already know who she was.  “What’s the situation?” she added hastily, hoping whoever was on the other end of the line wouldn’t notice her flub.

There was a brief lesson of silence before the caller answered.  “Yes, can I speak to the captain please?”

“I  _ am _ the captain.”

“What?  Aren’t you that guy that’s under investigation for, uh, I forgot what, but aren’t you?”  Their tone was that of someone asking of the person sitting across from them on the trans-Ooo train car if they really did recognize them from that off-Breadway production of  _ Summer Showers Revue _ .

Great, so her gator of a lieutenant Pete Stachio had gotten to this one, too.  “Right now I’m your commanding officer, whom  _ you _ called on her  _ emergency line _ .  What’s the situation?” she repeated, a note of irritation slipping into her voice.

“Oh, right, that.  Um, there’s somebody at the city gates demanding an audience with the Duke.”

“What?”  Mél tried to stand up, hitting her head against her desk; as she stumbled out, fumbling with her phone, she tripped over her shrine, scraping her legs painfully as she crushed it beyond recognition.  “Ow! I mean, elaborate on that.”

“It’s too dark to make out, but one of them’s got some sort of fire magic, and the other one’s weilding a pretty massive weapon.  They’re refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer.”

“I’ll be right over.  Don’t escalate things.”

She slammed her flip-phone and flipped herself over her desk, breaking into a dash as soon as her feet made contact with solid ground.  She hoped desperately that the guards would heed her warning and not make things worse by the time she got there, as unlike a hypothetical as that was.  Most people with an ounce of real potential got scoped by the greater Candy Kingdom police and defense forces, what with their better benefits and the inherent appeal of not being stationed in the mountains forever.  There were only three kinds of people who stayed to join the constabulary and royal guard. Some were loyal specifically to the Duchy of Nuts, like herself. Others were ambitious, and knew that it was easier to be a big fish if your pond was smaller, like Pete.  To put it tactfully, most of the guards were the third type. To put it tactlessly, they were morons.

At the edge of the castle grounds, she made a detour to the stables to retrieve her chrome motorcycle.  Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a horse, but it was big, had a leather seat, and had been modified to run on barley and sugar cubes, so legally speaking it qualified as one.  She unlocked its stall and threw open the door without slowing down, vaulting over its handlebars and twisting in midair to land with a satisfying thud on the seat. She depressed the pedal and the engine neighed to life, the sweet smell of burning grass filling the air.  Leaning forward until her face was against the small inset speedometer, she said, “Giddyup, Jackson,” and wheelied out of the stable.

The streets of Jugland were nearly empty at night, and in conjunction with the rising gibbous moon and the silvery wings of the moth swarm all unobstructed by clouds, they formed an enticing arena.  Mél wished she could simply ride through the urban maze, the crisp mountain air rushing past her shell, feeling the power of the bike under her complete control. Someday there would be time for that.  With a radical ride, however, came a radical responsibility. She headed straight for the main gate.

Half a block away, she parked Jackson and locked it to a large iron streetlight.  Patting it on its still-warm engine, she said, “I won’t be long,” and gave it a kiss.  Then she sprinted the rest of the way to the gate.

When it comes to cities, walls and gates typically come in pairs.  There’s no point in fortifying something nobody can use as a result of its fortification, and there’s no point in building an entrance to something whose entry isn’t otherwise obstructed.  In a way, Jugland fulfilled this archetype, but its walls did not tower over the city, casting the exterior residences in a veil of darkness whenever the sun began to dip. Instead, they were natural walls of sheer stone, and they sat beneath and around the city on a scale grander than any civilization could yet replicate.

As such, the architect who had designed the gate which cordoned the mesa off from the rest of the Sienna Ridge must have felt they had to compensate for ostentatious grandiosity with ostentatious flair.  The great brass archway stretched far above the roofs of any nearby buildings, decorated with a corkscrew weave and a massive replica of the town seal at the top. On the seal’s nose balanced a massive emblem of the town crest, depicting a mountain jay in portfolio with a gem clutched in its beak.  Beneath the bronze arch were two great slatted doors of green-painted iron, locked in the middle — three full meters off the ground — with an oversized mechanism shaped like a scythe and pickaxe with their heads entangled. Even in starlight, every part of it radiated with the sheen of polish and frost, giving it the air of something otherworldly.

On the other side of this marvel of engineering, two pike-bearing flaxseeds were arguing with a very disgruntled Macadamia.

“…so you see,” said one of the guards — Mél recognized his voice as the one who had called her — “if you’re not a kid, you can’t get in after dark without papers to prove you’ve got business here.”

“But I  _ am _ a kid.”  Macy sounded tired, like she had explained this same thing several times already, or alternatively like it was late at night and she wanted to sleep.

“Well, if you don’t have your papers, how can you prove it?” the other guard asked, picking her nose with her pike.

“I don’t have papers  _ because I’m a kid. _ ”

“Unfortunately for you,” said the first guard, “you’re going to need some papers to prove you’ve got business here, since it’s after dark.  Unless you’re a kid, of course.”

“She’s a kid,” interjected Mél.  The two guards jumped at the sound of her voice, dropping their pikes.  “The Duke’s kid, to be precise,” she clarified. “Macadamia Jugland, the young marquess.”

“Oh, well why didn’t you say so?” asked the first guard as his companion began undoing the complicated latch.

“I did.  Then you asked me to prove it, and we got stuck in an infinite loop.  For five minutes.”

“Well —  _ oof!” _   The second guard struggled to speak while she pulled the massive gate open.  “Should have —  _ hrrng! _ — had your papers.”

Mél reached through the opening and grabbed Macy by the hand.  The marquess’s fingers were cold to the touch and chapped. “Let’s get you home.  You can ride up front.”

“Thank you very much, Captain.”  Macy bowed as she followed her to the lamppost where Jackson was locked.

“No need to be formal.  Feel free to call me by my name.”

“Of course.”  Macy wordlessly climbed into the motorcycle basket as the engine neighed to life.

“You don’t actually remember my name, do you?”

A beat.  “I’m sorry,” she squeaked.

Mél chuckled.  “There’s nothing to be ashamed about; I’m sure there’s been a lot on your mind over the past two weeks.  The name’s—”

Macy couldn’t hear the rest of that sentence over the roar of the engine and the whistle of wind past her eardrums as Jackson raced through the silent streets of Jugland.

* * *

As the two parted ways in the castle’s grand foyer, Mél suddenly wheeled about to ask Macy where Robin was.  Apparently “zhe’s probably scaled the castle wall and gotten into my bedroom already” was not the right thing to say to the captain of the castle guard, for upon hearing that, Mél stood slack-jawed for longer than Macy had the patience to stay.  Without any further interruption, Macy climbed the winding stairs and traversed the darkened hallway to her room, preemptively announcing, “I’m Macadamia Jugland,” to the guards she spotted along the way to avoid any more delays.

The instant she got to her room, she tossed her backpack off and slumped against the door.  She hadn’t realized how weary her knees were until she didn’t need to use them. Now, she was dreading moving the two additional meters to her bed, let alone washing up beforehand.

As if on cue, Robin walked out of the bathroom, smelling like a lavender-scented wet dog.  “I’m headin’ out now,” zhe said as zhe climbed over the desk and pushed the large window open, letting in a chilly night breeze.  “You’d best wash up yourself.”

Macy simply stared at the rainicorn-dog, doing her best to make her eyes fierce even as her lids pulled themselves down to cover them.

Zhe stared back, zhir ruby peepers unblinking.  “You’d best,” zhe repeated. “Take some responsibility for yourself.  I’m gonna send my poppop a prismgram.” Zhe leapt out the window, closing it behind zhir with a rattling flick of zhir button-braided tail.

Macy groaned inwardly.  If Robin was really going to deliberately initiate contact with another living being besides her, Macy had no excuse to be lazy.  She pushed herself up, feeling heavier and grayer than she usually was, and stumbled into the bathroom to clean herself up.

* * *

When she was awoken from her nightmares by the streaming golden sunlight from her window, the first thing she noticed was how crowded her bedroom had become while she was unconscious.  Their shadows hung on the green patterned walls in the periphery vision like bespoke suits in a two-dimensional boutique which was inexplicably set up in the middle of the jungle because the tailor had severely overestimated his ability to sell civilized clothing to wild animals.  Despite feeling like her body was trying to drag her so deep into her bed that she would end up in some bizarre pillow dimension, she forced herself to sit up and blink sleepy flakes out of her eyes. Her legs hurt, her arms hurt, she’d slept in her hoodie, and despite cleaning up last night she still felt grimy.  That was just how it went when one had company, she supposed.

“Macy!”  Her dad was the first person to speak.  Kneeling next to her bed, he stretched out his arms to invite her into an embrace; she didn’t have the energy to accept or reject, so he just held them in the air awkwardly.  “I’m so glad you’re back! You should have told me the minute you got back — I assure you, it wouldn’t have been any bother. Far from it, in fact!”

“…wanted to sleep,” Macy moaned.  “Still do.”

“Oh.”  He crossed his arms behind his back and stood up, crestfallen.  “We’ll leave you be then.”

“No, that’s okay.  I’m already up.”  _ And I don’t want to continue that nightmare. _   She made a halfhearted attempt to push the covers off her which only succeeded in slightly ruffling them.  “What’d I miss?”

Pen, standing at the foot of the bed, tossed his long black toupee and smirked.  “Dad freaking out, mostly. I think he was more distraught over your little adventure than the ambassador’s murder.”

“I was distraught about both!” the Duke said in a tone that bordered on petulance.  “I merely felt more personal responsibility for what happened to you.”

“Yeah, because it was your fault,” said Archie, leaning against the doorway.  She had on a purple raincoat (an odd accessory at an elevation where rain was a nonentity), and she was smoking a pixie stick while looking at her phone.  As she sunk her weight into the doorframe, it let out an audible creak, clearly reaching the limit of its stress capacity and in danger of breaking from reckless abuse.  Never in her life had Macy more wanted to be like somebody else.

“Och,  _ déagóir,” _ said Galé, on the other side of the room, standing next to the open window.  “You’ve got ta quell yer flame, lest y’burn somethin’ important. ‘Twere nae the sins o’ the  _ athair _ which wrecked th’ balance o’ th’ house.”

Archie looked up, looking momentarily lost as she attempted to piece together what the younger of her older brothers had said.  “Well, it’s certainly not the sins o’ the  _ iníon,” _ she replied eventually.  “Macy felt like Dad was stifling her freedom, so she went out to claim it for herself.”  She looked Macy in the eye for what might have been the first time. “Isn’t that right, Macy?”

Macy nodded vigorously.  Archie was the best sister she could ask for, and an excellent role model, and definitely extremely very good and right in all the things she said and did.  “I learned so much about being an adventurer,” she said, throwing her covers off and hopping off the bed with a thud. “Like how it’s super dangerous but as long as I can acknowledge the limits of my abilities I can do anything (within reason) that I put my mind to.

“Wait,” she continued.  She hooked a finger on her bottom lip as if trying to tug a train of thought out from the recess of her mind via her nut jaw.  “I think earlier when you asked if it was your fault, I was supposed to say,  _ no, it wasn’t, I should have realized you only had my best interests in mind. _   I was rehearsing that all week, too.  Math this, it’s too early in the morning for emotions.”

Without further acknowledgement of anyone in the room, Macy walked into the bathroom to brush her teeth and buff her shell.  This left her father the Duke to silently process the onslaught of confliction emotions, of guilt and relief and happiness and confusion, all of which in summation felt quite a lot like exhaustion.

* * *

For the rest of the day, Macy didn’t do much more than recount the story of her week to anyone who would listen, which was everyone.  With each telling, the story became more and more fantastic. At first, she kept the stories of the sandwich, the golf tournament, and the Evil Forest separate.  Then she claimed that thugs from the anarchist mafia had been invited to Stupendous Hal’s. After that, she said that the Grass Dragon was a beast from the Crystal Dimension sent to retrieve a sandwich recipe.  By the time she was telling the story to Lisby, the cashew butler, she and Robin had become legendary chosen wielders of ultimate putters with which they launched flickering desklamps at evil rabbits to protect two-inch-tall giants from plundering hordes of why-wolves.  The fact that she never once slipped and mentioned the Mergence by name would have been commendable had it not been accidental.

“But if you lost one of your arms and both of your legs saving Robin from that acid ray,” asked an enraptured yet confused Lisby, “how do you still have them?”

Macy smirked and tapped her forehead.  “Macadamias are a tough genus.”

“That makes sense.”

Robin realized fairly quickly that it would fall to zhir to actually find out what had happened while the two of them were away.  Having alloted all of zhir emotional energy to leaving a prismgram message for zhir poppop last night, zhe instead used the trick zhe had developed in the forest to blur zhir form and sneak around on the off chance passersby would discuss anything interesting.  Zhe learned a great many things this way. The winds had gotten warmer from the south. The Duke had signed a trade deal with the Ice Kingdom. Ambassador Palmerson’s funeral was scheduled for next Saturfriday. Archaeologists had discovered a new kind of cherry soda.  Someone named Miranda was cheating on someone named Eleanor with a tourist, who was also named Eleanor.

What zhe was most interested in, however, was what people had to say about Captain Amélie Faucher, and people had a  _ lot _ to say about her.  She was a traitor. She was innocent.  She was grieving. She was a cheater. She was faking it.  She hadn’t really earned her spot as guard captain. She had earned it twelve times over.  Even if she was a traitor, she was justified. Even if she wasn’t a traitor, she should still be punished as one.  She had a cool horse.

After several hours of dropping eaves, Robin realized nobody who was talking about her actually knew what she had been accused of, only that it was supposedly bad.  Either that or everyone knew, and everyone knew everyone knew, so nobody actually said it. Not one person was kind enough to both know and reveal specific updates on the investigation in a place where anyone could overhear them.  Truly, the noble art of eavesdropping was facing an unacceptable crisis.

Finally zhir curiosity overcame zhir social anxiety and zhe decided to simply ask Mél directly.  Zhe found zhir way to the guard captain’s office, where she was dressing down another guard about lax security around the side of the castle that overlooked the Valley of Moths.

“I’m not saying you need to divert your entire group’s effort to overlooking that wall,” she said; Robin couldn’t see her face, but the breathy weariness in her voice painted a vivid enough picture even without the smell of nervous sweat.  “Just make a pass every once in a while to address a known, repeatable blind spot.”

“I guess that sounds reasonable,” said the guard, “but if this turns out to be a trick—”

“It’s not.  Goodbye.”

As the guard left Mél’s office, letting the door slam into the wall as they stomped away, Robin squeezed in.  “Oh hi Mél,” zhe said as zhe heard the door click back into place after bouncing off the wall. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

The captain barely looked up from where her head rested on her desk.  The creaking sound the desk emitted might have come from her eyes as they slowly tracked toward Robin and then back down.  “Yes,” she sighed, “but I suppose you probably will anyway.”

“So.”  Zhe dismissed zhir blurring restored zhir colors to their normal form.  Zhe had always found that most people got confused when zhe changed drastically in physical appearance on a whim, so zhe had made a habit of reverting to zhir normal color scheme in polite conversation.  Never let it be said that zhe made no concessions to their primitive, non-rainicorn brains. “What’s the situation on the whole ‘false accusation of treason’ thing?”

A beat.  “Can I change my answer?”

“I just want to help, alright?  Even though there’s no possible way I could be blamed for any of the stuff that’s going on here, there’s a tiny irrational part of my brain that feels the meagerest sliver of an iota of responsibility.”

“Ya don’t say.”  It was probably just her exhaustion that made her sound sarcastic.

“I do don’t say.  My point is, if there’s anything you need, I’m here to help.”

Mél pushed herself upright with a grunt of effort.  “There’s one problem with that plan,” she said. “What could you possibly do to help that wouldn’t just get me in further trouble?  You’re not a reliable character witness, and you’ve very carefully avoided doing anything to get on good terms with Pen. Why is that, by the way?”

“Grownup stuff.  You’ll understand when you’re older.”

“I  _ am _ older.”

“Not in rainicorn-dog years, you aren’t.”  Also zhe had momentarily forgotten zhe was speaking to someone who wasn’t a preteen for once, but zhe decided not to reveal that particular tidbit.

“Look, you’re wasting your time.”  She picked up a stack of papers and dropped it immediately.  “I’ve got a lot of whatever this is to look over, there’s a grand jury hearing in three days about my affair, and I’m still grieving, so could you just drop it?  You’re barking up the wrong tree, pup.”

Robin tilted zhir head in confusion.  “Are you talking about your case, or…?”

“Yes.  Obviously.  Now, with all due respect, get the dreck out of my office.”

* * *

The trial came and went with little fanfare.  During the intervening eight days, Cash Daniels had sorted through the impounded communique on Pen’s behalf, but as much as she was loathe to admit it, no evidence of high treason had come to light.  Although Macy seemed bizarrely unconvinced by this, it was enough for the guard captain to be merely reprimanded for gross violation of workplace etiquette. The tone of the conversation about her remained the same afterwards, but the frequency with which she was brought up greatly diminished.  Most people seemed not to care too much about the antics of the royal guard.

Three more days after that, a much more momentous occasion loomed: Macy’s first day of school in the Nut Kingdom.  As the day approached, she seemed more terrified than she had been while she was actively fighting the grass dragon.  The more the Duke reassured her that the classes here were smaller and the teachers would be able to help her if she started panicking or hallucinating, the more Macy started panicking and hallucinating.  Eventually it got so bad that Robin was afraid to leave Macy’s side, even sleeping in her room the night before.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go into the forest?” Macy asked as she brushed her teeth, looking at Robin’s eyes in the bathroom mirror.  “You haven’t willingly slept inside in years.”

“I’m sure,” said Robin, wiping a soapy washcloth across zhir ruby eyes.  Zhir vision was always better after zhe did this. Zhe should really start carrying a kit for that around with zhir, but zhe never had that in mind when it came time to pack.

“Well, then, could you at least stop staring at me constantly?  Especially when you’re doing  _ that?” _

“Only if you promise to stop hallucinating about that one time you froze up in front of a classroom.”

Macy began hallucinating about that one time she froze up in front of a classroom.

Robin dropped zhir washcloth onto the floor with a wet splotch and sighed.  “This is why you need me around.” Zhe closed zhir eyes and entered Macy’s mindscape yet again.

The room Robin walked into was familiar.  Macy was standing at the front of a small, windowed classroom, a formless teacher sitting at a desk to the side, a sea of desks before her, none of them empty.  On a previous occasion, Robin had managed to snap Macy out of it by asking where her desk was if all of them were occupied, but that trick hadn’t worked twice. This time, though, the kids sitting in the desks were different.  Rather than judgemental, their expressions were stoic and wooden. In fact, their whole bodies were wooden — crude marionettes suspended from spider-silk strings leading up into the fluorescent void where the ceiling ought to have been.

“Psst, hey Macy,” whispered Robin, cupping a paw in front of zhir mouth so the puppets wouldn’t see her voice.  “What’s going on?”

“I think the dreams are mixing,” Macy said, without interrupting her own monolog about the exploits of Fionn the Human.  “Since I’m about to go to sleep, I’ve been thinking about my nightmares.”

“You’ve been having nightmares?”

The nut skilted; the room’s gravity changed to match.  “Have you not been checking up on my dreams?”

“Of course.  You made it sound like you wanted me to stop doing that.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like I ever thought you actually  _ would.” _

Zhe put a paw on Macy’s shoulder, pressing it level.  “C’mon, why would I ever step across a clearly-established personal boundary?”

She brushed zhir paw off; it hit the floor so hard it cracked the floorboards, and Robin felt the splinters pierce zhir paw all the way up to zhir heart.  “I don’t want to have this conversation right now, Robin,” said Macy over the background noise of her own continuing lecture, spinning around on her formerly broken leg to face away from Robin and into the indeterminate void beyond the window.  “Or ever,” she added, “so why don’t you just—”

Suddenly the marionettes attacked, dogpiling Macy through the blackboard at the front of the classroom and into the sky high above Castle Jugland.  She was wearing a thick woolen parka and aviator goggles now, fending off her former classmates with a small pink water pistol. Robin leapt through, and as zhe did so zhe could feel zhir form grow in size.  Zhe swatted puppets away with massive blue fists, shattering them on contact.

Macy turned to Robin with gratitude in her eyes.  In the reflection of those goggles, zhe saw zhir face — zhir five narrow eyes — and zhe recognized zhirself in two places.  Zhe was both Jake and the shapeshifter from the Evil Forest.

_ Wait a tick, _ zhe realized.   _ The shapeshifter  _ was _ Jake. _   Then the two impacted the imaginary snow below, and in the shock zhe immediately forgot this realization.

Macy, now wearing her grey hoodie, hoisted Robin out of the meter-deep frosting.  “Thanks for the save,” she said. “I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep for days.”

Robin began scooping up dream frosting and shoving it into zhir mouth.   _ Mmm, vanilla. _   “Becaushe of the puppetsh?” zhe asked between swallows.

“Sometimes.  Sometimes it’s signs zombies, other times it’s nutcrackers.  Always it’s something made of wood. Except for one.”

Robin swallowed, belching.  “The Highway 384 sign.”

“Yeah, exac— wait.  Highway?”

Zhe nodded.  “I asked Charlie about it.  That blue shield is a twenty-first century symbol for a certain type of highway.”

She skilted again.  Robin compensated for another gravity shift, but when one didn’t come, zhe instead fell into the frosting.  “You’ve been  _ (huff) _ talking to your comatose great-aunt?” she asked as she hoisted zhir up once more.

“Yes.  Now, let’s talk about your trauma.  Macy, this isn’t something you can’t find help for.  You need to talk to someone about this.” Robin shifted into a couch.  “Luckily, I’m right here.”

“Yeah,” Macy agreed.  “I’ll see if the school counselors can give me some counseling.”

“I want to be offended by your refusal to acknowledge my offer of support, but I can’t shake the feeling it’s entirely warranted.”

“Well, you  _ are _ the self-proclaimed disresponsible one.”  She put her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow.  “Didn’t you come in here to snap me  _ out _ of my hallucination?”

“Oh, right, I almost forgot.  Macy, snap out of your hallucination.”

Macy snapped out of her hallucination.

* * *

That night, as promised, Robin watched over Macy’s dreams.  There was nothing particularly novel about them, no new trauma uncovered, no premonition marked by a glittering strigiform, no other interloper from beyond the veil of conscious thought.  There was simply worry made manifest in a thousand strange familiar forms. Each time they attempted to overwhelm Macy, Robin stepped in to save her, and a dream that had been about disaster and improbable pain became an ordinary lucid trip.  When she awoke the next morning, Macy felt more refreshed than ever, so when the sunlight greeted her through the window, she greeted it back.

“Gooooooooood morning, sun!” she sang as she sat up, stretching her arms to accentuate her spontaneous cadence.  She peered over the edge of the bed, where Robin was curled on a pillow, having shrunk zhirself to the size of a possum.  “Good morning, Rob—”

“No,” said Robin, eyes still closed, stretching a paw to Macy’s lip but otherwise not moving.  “No, we’re not doing that again. Got it?”

Macy nodded.

As the nut washed up and prepared for the day, even going so far as to put on clothes (jeans and a green polo shirt), Robin conjured an illusory shadow around zhirself to block out the morning light.  Rainicorn-dogs were not meant to operate without sleep, and rest spent projected outside one’s body was not effective rest. By the time Macy set foot out the door of her bedroom, Robin was already snoring like a tiny locomotive.

Breakfast was tense that morning.  Pen had left to meet his wife and daughter at the outskirts of the city, the Duchess was busy micromanaging the gardeners, and Galé was off doing Glob knows what, which left Macy, Archie, Vesper, and the Duke to pick at their pancakes.  There was still an unbroken tension between Macy and her father, which hung so thick in the air that in between bites Archie pulled her Rocker Mortis t-shirt over her mouth as if trying to avoid a bad smell.

It was Vesper who eventually broke the silence.  “Are you people keeping secrets without me?”

“What?” said Pen, letting his final pancake slide onto the table.  “What are you talking about? No. We’re just nervous for Macy’s first day of school, that’s all.”

“Well, I  _ wasn’t,” _ Macy lied, “but I am now, so thanks.”

Vesper pounded their hands on the table, their long white robe sleeves flapping audibly.  “You are!” they shouted. “You’re keeping secrets that I don’t know about.”

“No, they’re not,” said Archie, her voice muffled behind her stretched-out t-shirt.  “They’re just being awkward because Macy’s becoming a teenager and thus is required by law to be weird toward Dad.”

“No way.”  Vesper picked up their tall glass of orange juice and tipped it toward the Duke.  “Uncle’s being way too quiet for that to be all that’s going on. He’s a kind soul, and kind souls know no silence.  Silence is darkness, and he is light, so this quiet must be one born in the shadow of a secret.”

Everyone turned to stare at them, stopping whatever they were doing.  Macy had been taking a drink of orange juice, so her juice began to pour onto the ground.

“What?” asked Vesper.  “I’m right, aren’t I?”

Macy took a loud sip from her empty cup and slammed it down onto the table.  “What on Abe’s red Mars are you talking about? The only reason Dad and I are being awkward is because he feels guilty about coddling me and I feel guilty about making him feel bad about that!”

“Oh, Macy!” exclaimed the Duke, reaching out his hand.  “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel guilty about my guilt.”

“No, don’t be,” said Macy.  “And not just because we’d get caught in an infinite hula-hoop.  I didn’t mean to make you feel bad, I just wanted to say whatever would make us not go through this same scenario again.”

“I completely understand.”  He went to scoop up some pancakes, but then Archie kicked him under the table.  “Ow! What was that for?”

“But…?” Archie prompted.

The Duke sighed.  “But…  That isn’t just a one-way transaction, Macy.  If I’m going to be more open and specific about my concerns for you, and I am, then I’m going to have to ask you to please consider being more emotionally honest with me as well.  You can’t just treat my feelings like they don’t matter, as if I’m merely a means to an end.” He stretched out his hand once more. “Do we have a deal?”

Macy pursed her lips and accepted his handshake.  “Deal,” she said. A beat. “Also, what time is it?”

The Duke looked at the watch on his other wrist and exclaimed, “It’s time to skedaddle!”  The two of them pushed away from the table like it had said something socially inappropriate and they wanted to distance themselves from it as quickly as possible, then ran out of the room so fast Macy’s chair fell over.

Once they were gone, Vesper chuckled.  “You were right, Arachis. That went even better than anticipated.”

“Of course I’m right,” said Archie, leaning back in her chair and wobbling.  “Also, please don’t call me Arachis, it’s lame. It’s a lame name. It’s my lame name shame, and your uncle gets the lame name shame blame in the lame name shame blame game.”

“I think it’s cool.”  They cut off a piece of pancake, dipped it in orange juice, then swallowed it without chewing.  “And my payment for this little intervention?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll get you Pecan’s soul by tonight.  Girl barely uses it anyway, shouldn’t be too hard.” She sighed, which was enough to cause her to topple backwards in her chair.  As she sat up, she moaned, “At least I don’t need to feel guilty about anything anymore.”

* * *

Robin still felt guilty, so when zhe finally awoke from zhir nap at half past two, zhe immediately headed over to the Gusty Goat to get crunked on ginger ale.  When zhe stepped into the bustling tavern, the sunflower bartender Helix gave zhir a dirty look. Robin held up an assuaging paw and began retching before coughing up a gold coin on the bar: more than enough to cover zhir tab.

“The usual,” zhe croaked.  Helix nodded, picking up the coin with one of their leaves and dunking it in a handy bottle of acetone before going behind the bar to fetch the high-quality cheap soda.

Robin slumped onto the bar, zhir form sagging like putty.  “What am I doing?” zhe asked to nobody. “Why do I still feel this way?”

“What way?” asked a familiar voice as a large, spiked karuka nut sat down next to zhir.

“Pointless,” Robin replied, peeling zhir head off the polished wood with a loud squelch.  “Like I’m not chasing my tail.”

“ _ Un accés d’ennui, _ then, pardon my swearing.  You know what you need?”

“What, Jeff?”

“Your ginger ale,” said Helix, setting a foaming pint down in front of Robin.

“That’s probably it,” Robin said.  Zhe began lapping at the foam with zhir tongue.

“You can’t just drink your problems away, Robin.”  Jeff fidgeted with one of his many belts. “Or lap them away, or any other form of beverage consumption them away.”

Robin stopped lapping to stare directly at Jeff, ginger ale dripping off zhir sopping black jowls.  “What if my problem’s that I’ve got a delicious pop sitting right in fronna me and I haven’t drunk it all yet?”

“I’ll concede the point.”  Jeff eyed Helix as they walked away to attend to some customers at the other end of the bar, then leaned close to Robin’s ear.  “Although if you’re really feeling listless, perhaps you’d consider doing me a favor to take your mind off things for a bit.”

Robin stirred zhir soda with zhir horn as zhe considered this.  “No,” zhe said. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past couple weeks, it’s that I need to start being more selfish and only do things that I specifically want to do.”

“Huh?  Why would you—”  Jeff shook his head, causing his numerous belt buckles to jingle like bells.  “Fine, then. Let me ask you this: How do you feel about mad dosh?”

“What, you mean like some sort of kabbalahic treasure golem?”

“No, but let me know if you hear about anything like that, it sounds cool.  I’m talking about a big… you know. Apple harvest.” He winked.

Zhe tilted zhir pint and continued lapping for a bit before replying.  “Apples don’t go for that much a pop.”

“No, I mean—”  He turned away and took a deep breath before continuing.  “I mean, these are the real high quality fruitses. You know, ‘apple of your eye’ sort of dealio.”

“But my eyes are ohhhhhhhh.  I gotcha.” Zhe went for a few more laps.  “So the harvest finally came in?”

“Not yet.  They can’t, uh, get into the field.  The fence has more locks than expected, and the apple-picker’s caught up in traffic.”

“Are you asking me to pick apples?”  Robin raised an eyebrow. “Because don’t get me wrong, I’d be down to do that kind of thing, but I don’t think I have that kind of work ethic.”

“No, no, I wouldn’t ask you to, um.”  He started rapping his knuckles against the underside of the bar as he tried to think of a way to continue the running metaphor.  “…to infringe upon the apple-picking union’s rules. Everything on your end is strictly above-board. I’d just need you to ask about  _ why _ the orchard has so many locks, that’s all.  In exchange, you’d get ten percent of the harvest.  Do we have a deal?” He extended his hand.

“We do,” said Robin, accepting his handshake.  “You can count on me.”

* * *

“Hey, Mél,” said Robin, “you should arrest Jeff the Karuka.”

“Grod dammit, Robin,” came Mél’s voice from the other end of the phone, barely audible over the sound of the rushing wind from atop the Gusty Goat’s roof.  “Is this really why you called me?”

“Yeah, I mean I figured that if you didn’t want me interfering with covering up that treason you definitely never committed, I could at least help you out by handing you a potential conspirator in that jewel theft that never ended up materializing.”

“No, seriously, what’s going on?  When did you even  _ get _ my personal number?”

“I stole a business card last time I was in your office.  Listen—”

“Are you attempting to perform a citizen’s arrest.”  Her intonation was totally flat, colored with a faint growl of annoyance.

“Uh, if that’s the thing where I found out someone was doing a crime, then yes.”

“Was he actively committing a crime?”

“No.”

“Do you have any proof that he committed a crime?”

“No.”

“Did he do or say anything that independent witnesses could verify were indicative of a clear and present danger in connection to future crimes?”

“No.”   _ Man, she’s being really pedantic about this. _

A beat.  “Then,” said Mél, and then she hung up.

Robin waited patiently at the dialtone for three and a half hours before zhe finally needed to go to the bathroom.  Figuring it would be too awkward to go back into the Gusty Goad, zhe instead made the trek back to Castle Jugland. On the way, zhe started thinking up what else zhe could do  to remove the formless, sourceless guilt that was weighing on her. Triple-cross Jeff and decide to actually do what he wanted (wait was that what a triple cross was)? Get Princeso another orphan to look after?  Travel back in time and prevent Macy’s parents from dying in that earthquake twelve years ago, therefore preventing Macy from having a falling out with the Duke by stopping the Duke from ever having been her dad? These were all good ideas, but zhe couldn’t decide on just one, and doing multiple things sounded like way too much work.

Coming out of the bathroom, zhe ran into Macy.  “Oh!” she exclaimed, holding a hand to her chest like her nut heart had been set a-flutter.  “I didn’t realize you were awake.”

“That’s okay,” said Robin.  “I get that a lot. So, you headin’ to dinner?”

“Yeah.  Will you be eating with us tonight?”

“Nah, I’m gonna scrounge up some grub in the woods.  It’s where I do my best percolatin’, and I’ve got a lot to percolate.”

“So do I.”  Macy tapped her forehead and chuckled.  “They’re really trying to cram as much as they can into the ol’ noggin on my first day.  Between all these classes, the new calendar, and just figuring out the layout of the school, I’ve got quite the magpie’s nest in front of me.”

Robin blinked in confusion.  “You have birds?”

“No, it’s apparently an expression around here.  I think it just means a difficult task.”

“What’s difficult about magpies?”

“Oh, quit being so jagged, you rusty turnstile.  I’m over here trying to tumble my gems and you’re just cracking eggs into the firepit.”

“You’re making up expressions again.”

“Believe what you want to believe.”

“I always do, Macy.”  Zhe gave her a wink as zhe walked away, morphing the top of zhir head into a pompadour.  “I always do.”

“Wait!” called Macy.  “Aren’t you going to ask me more about my first day of school?”

“At some point, probably.”  And with that Robin leapt out a window.

Macy skilted, then shook her head and tsked.  “Sometimes, that enby really yanks my whiskers.”

* * *

As the rest of the family found out over dinner, Macy’s first day of school had gone rather well overall.  Although she was joining in the middle of the year, Princeso had ensured that her education was at least on par with the standardized system in as many ways as he could.   The teachers were more than willing to help her get acclimated, and she found a small posse of students who promised to help fill in what few gaps there were. After school, she had talked briefly to the school’s on-staff psychological counselor, Dr. Upe, who immediately seemed more helpful than the one from the Candy Kingdom had ever been.  She’d be seeing xyr every second Twosday starting next week.

“Bah!” exclaimed her mother, furiously deboning a chicken leg.  “I don’t trust psychologists. They always say the same thing. ‘You can’t just order all your problems to go away, that doesn’t solve anything.’  Hours of sitting in an uncomfortable chair explaining in detail the many ways the world has set out to get you, personally, only to be told at the end that you’re projecting?  The gall!”

“Now, honey, we’ve talked about this.”  The Duke’s voice was soothing like warm honey.  “You shouldn’t make such hasty judgements. You went to see one psychologist twenty years ago; that’s no reason to cast aspersions on the entire profession.”

“That’s what they  _ want _ you to think.  I swear, they’re probably a part of some secret cabal that’s conspiring to manipulate world events from behind the scenes.  Heed my words, you wretched ingrates!”

“I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment,” said Vesper, who hadn’t touched their meal, “but the psychologists aren’t the masterminds.  That role is filled by the schoolteachers themselves, attempting to indoctrinate the future of Ooo with conformist principles while hiding away knowledge of the obscure and arcane behind a barrier of expertise.”

“You’re both wrong,” interjected Archie, who was drawing a skull in her mashed potatoes.  “The real conspiracy controlling world events is the hereditary ruling class that keeps power in the hands of a small and arbitrary collection of people who are neither chosen by nor representative of the masses.”

“But Archie,” Galé asked in that bizarre brogue of his, “ain’t  _ ye _ a memb’r o’ tha heredit’ry rulin’ class?”

“For now,” she said ominously.  She looked across the table at Macy.  “What do you think, sis? Is the inheritance of authority a blight on modernity and a perversion of all that we claim to hold dear?”

Macy picked up her plate and walked out of the room without saying a word.  Nobody stopped her. That was simply not a question she wanted to consider tonight.  Instead, she took her half-eaten tofu burger all the way out of the city of Jugland and down into the valley to finish it with Robin in the forest.

By the time she got there, Robin was almost finished setting up a stovetop above zhir campfire.  Zhe had built an elaborate makeshift kitchen out of nothing but twigs, leaves, mud, rocks, duct tape, and industrial-strength rebar.  A small lizard sat nearby, examining the construction with a curious tongue and what Macy could only imagine to be an incredibly discerning eye.

“Room for one more?” asked Macy, standing just inside the fire’s glow, on the border of warmth and cold.

“Oh, sure,” said Robin.  Zhe poured oil into a pan on the stovetop, dropped in what seemed to be way too large a heap of spinach, and then walked over to a small tree near Macy  With a few swift chops from the handaxe zhe’d gotten from Huntress Wizard, zhe cut it down; zhe took out a belt sander to smooth the stump, then gestured for Macy to sit down.

As she took her seat, she remarked, “This is certainly a cozy setup you’ve got here.  A lot more civilized than I would expect.”

Zhe took out a pair of tongs and began carefully maneuvering the spinach pile, attempting to get all its strata equally sauteed.  “Why? It’s not like any of this isn’t natural.”

“It very much is like that, Robin.”

“Nah, not really.  We like to draw an imaginary line between what’s considered domestic versus natural, but the truth is that the distinction is fairly arbitrary.  Positioning the constructs of civilization as in any way different from other parts of the natural order represents an elevation of the familiar to a separate plane of existence than all other forms of life, a separation which is not only counterfactual but rooted in harmful and dominationist views of nature.  Deep down we’re all animals, so the things we create are no more or less natural than a mountain. Even the most bizarre, egoistic machinations of people who want to exploit the ‘natural world’ are but another part of that world, and ultimately are subject to the same tidal forces which govern the balance of reality.”

“Whoa.  Is that all true, or did you just say that to justify mimicking a modern kitchen while still calling yourself a naturalist?”

“It can be both things.”  By now, the spinach she was stirring had wilted so far down that without standing Macy couldn’t see it over the lip of the pan.  Robin sniffed the saute. “Oh, fleas and lice, I forgot to add the mushrooms! That was a wasted trip to the supermarket.”

“How do you even have money to buy things at the supermarket?” asked Macy, crossing her legs on the stump and fiddling with her knees.

“I’ve been selling foraged berries to random shopkeepers in bulk.”  Zhe took the spinach off the stove and put it on a plastic plate. “They never pay full market price, but they seem willing to buy as many berries as I can find even when it’s way more than they could ever hope to sell before they expire.  I think they might be confused at how this whole business thing works, but I’m not going to look a horse’s gift in the mouth.”

“Maybe… maybe you should.”

“Hm?”  Robin sat down across from Macy, zhir uncompressed curled into a pyramid which loomed above her.  “What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know.  I feel like, just maybe, you might want to be a bit more…”  She sighed, stood up on her stump, and stared up at Robin. “Listen, if there’s one thing I learned over the past couple weeks, it’s the power of connections, and the most important part of a connection is communication.  I need to learn to be more honest in my relationships if I’m going to expect total honestly in return, and that doesn’t just apply to my dad. With that in mind, there’s something that I’ve started to notice recently, which has probably been true for a long time but that I couldn’t really notice until I got a change in perspective.”

Robin shoved zhir entire plate into zhir mouth and swallowed.  “Wuzzit?”

“Sometimes — not all the time, but sometimes — you can come across to people as a teeny, tiny, ittle-bitty bit of a jerk.”

“Oh, is that the case?”

“And that’s a  _ bad _ thing.  Believe me, Robin, I understand why you do it.  It’s easier to distance yourself from others than to consider how your actions intertwine with theirs.  I do this by internalizing everything, because it feels easier to think everything’s my fault than to do anything to make it better.  You, on the other hand, show everyone the thornbush. I get that I’m one of the only people you trust, but that doesn’t mean you need to scorn everyone else at every occasion.”

“I don’t do that,” Robin protested, but zhe was shrinking and zhir color was turning red.  Macy had struck a vein. “I’m just a funny guy.”

“You’ve been rude to so many of the people close to me that I barely even notice anymore, but when I finally got away from you for school, I noticed the  _ absence _ of scorn.  That’s not okay.  I need you to promise that you’ll try to improve.”

“I’ll…”  The one-meter-tall rainicorn-dog inhaled sharply.  “I’ll try,” zhe said. “Maybe not to be  _ less _ of a jerk, but to at least put my jerkiness into a more channeled direction.  That way, I’ll still be doing it for myself, which is the important lesson  _ I’ve _ learned.”

“Robin, that’s a terrible lesson.”

“Nope, just learned it, you’ll need to wait at least a month before getting me to un-learn it.”  Zhe smirked. “After all, I’m not as frequent a philosophical flip-flopper as you are, miss I-suddenly-always-wanted-to-be-a-huntress.”

“Hey!”  Robin  _ could _ , in fact, make out a faint blush behind Macy’s flustered shell.  “That’s uncalled for!”

Zhe shrugged.  “You wanted me to be more directed in my jerkiness, so I am.”

“No, that’s you who wanted that.”

“Let’s not get bogged down in semantics.”  Zhe pointed at Macy’s now-empty plate. “Are you gonna eat that?”

* * *

The next day, Robin was up early enough to see Macy off to school.  Macy turned down zhir generous offer to be her backpack, which honestly stung a little, but nevertheless Robin decided to spend the rest of the day until Macy got home, for the next four days, putting into practice the nonchalant promise zhe had made last night.  Zhe told Galé that zhe didn’t find his accent annoying in the slightest. Zhe fed the Duchess’s pet rock. Zhe helped Archie with her soul-binding runes by casting illusory guidelines. Zhe had Lisby greet zhir over and over pretending to be various citizens of the Duchy of Nuts until zhe managed to respond without adding a cutting personal barb.  Zhe had such a hard time locating Vesper that zhe ended up questioning whether such a creature had ever existed in the first place, but other than that, zhe had made some token amends toward every member of the family.

There was one last person zhe had to talk to.  Once more zhe found zhirself standing outside the guard captain’s office  door. Zhe could hear a muttered prayer to Grob Gob Glob Grod. Zhe couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded desperate.  Zhe waited until the penitent fell to silence before zhe knocked.

When Mél spoke up, her desperation had switched to annoyance.  “Grod  _ dammit _ , Robin,” she said, followed by a thump and an “Ow!”

Robin pushed open the door and took a seat on the standard-issue folding chair on the visitor side of Mél’s desk, just as the almond got up from behind the desk and sat down in her creaky swivel chair.  “Hey, uh, how did you know it was me?” asked Robin.

“You’ve come by so many times that I recognize your particular knocking rhythm.  Also you smell like wet dog.”

“Yer not ‘zactly snow white yourself, sister.”  Robin crinkled zhir nose. “You smell like you tried to take a—”  Zhe slapped a paw over zhir mouth, feeling the saturation drain from zhir body.   _ “Malgisteol, _ I’m stupid!” zhe said in a tiny voice.  “I wasn’t supposed to say any of that.”

Mél’s expression was unchanged.  “I should certainly hope not.”

“Listen, I’m so very extremely sorry about what happened to the guy who was having an affair with you.”

“That’s not much better.”  Mél lowered her head into her hands, then looked up.  “Are you actually unable to express condolences without sarcasm?  Do you need counseling?”

“No, that’s not it.  I just couldn’t remember his name.”

“That excuse is just stupid enough that I can believe even you wouldn’t make it up.”

“I’m sure he meant a lot to you,” Robin continued.  “Definitely more than his spouse(s) meant to him. Your connection must have been really, really for him to violate their trust(s) like that.  I can’t begin to imagine what it must feel like to lose a bond like that.”

“Can you stop that?” Mél snapped, balling her fists.  “I don’t need to be reminded of his mistakes while I’m still the only one actually grieving his passing.”

“Huh?”  Robin tilted zhir head in confusion, the saturation seeping back into zhir fur.  “This is me  _ not _ being a jerk.”

A beat.  “Of course it is,” Mél groaned.  She sat up straight, tugging the rumples out of zhir uniform and clearing her throat.  “State your business.”

“I just wanted to express my condolences.  I mean, better than I already have. The truth is, I know what it’s like to be alone in the mourning process.  I had a brother who died when I was young. My father barely cared, and my mother never even found out. Nobody at school liked him because he used to bully them and steal their lunch money.  From then on I decided that I would bully them and steal their lunch money to honor his memory.”

Mél’s posture collapsed again.  “Oh, Robin, I didn’t know. It blows, doesn’t it?  As if the whole world is cold and empty and you’re the only person in it, because you’re the only one who can feel anything at this tragedy.  Just knowing that I’m not alone in this…” She reached out to clasp Robin’s paw, blinking away a single tear. “Thank you for revealing this part of your soul.”

“No problem.”  Robin picked up Mél’s hand and put it on her desk as zhe walked out of the office, closing the door behind zhirself with a swish of zhir tail.   _ If I’d known getting people to overlook my faux pas were that easy, I would have been making up stories about my brother for years. _

* * *

That weekend, Pen and his family came to stay overnight at the castle.  It wasn’t Macy’s first time meeting her birdologist sister-in-law Colla — they had exchanged greetings briefly after the Faucher trial — but they hadn’t gotten much of a chance to get to know each other.  Macy was the kind of person who was happy to meet anyone, no matter how boring she found them to be, and birdology was far from boring. She found herself enraptured by the well-dressed peanut, hanging on her every word while Robin the fashionable scarf hung around Macy’s lack of neck.

“…five thousand, four hundred and seventy-two,” Colla was saying, “but next year we hope to get at least twice that many.  That should let us increase the sample size enough that if the effect due to temperature is as high as we’ve estimated, we’ll clear the significance threshold by simply repeating the experimental design we already have set up.”

“Wow, that’s really interesting,” said Macy, leaning against an art-deco wall and sipping grape juice out of a cocktail glass.  “You’re making me want to be a birdologist myself.”

Robin formed a mouth to whisper in Macy’s ear slit, “What are you talking about?  You clearly don’t have any idea what she’s saying, and even though you’re actively speaking I can tell you’re already slipping into unconsciousness from sheer boredom.”

“I thought you were going to be less of a — I mean, a more directed jerk,” she whispered back.

“I mean, yeah, of course I am.  That’s why I’m only saying this to  _ you.” _

Colla couldn’t hear Robin, but she could still easily tell something was rong.  “If I’m boring you, you can just say so,” she said, a frown tugging at the corner of her smile.  “I’m not offended,” she lied.

“Oh, no, this is really fascinating!” Macy assured her.  “I’m just trying to get into the learning rhythm since I just transferred to the local school and all.  Want to get that momentum going.”

“Ah, of course!”  Colla crouched down, putting her hands on her knees, which because her face was on the same place as Penn’s meant she now had to look up at Macy.  “Have you started making friends?”

“Yep.  Mostly.  Kinda. Sorta.”  Macy drooped; Robin slid onto the floor and began to reform.  “Not really. Everyone already has friends. There are people who’ll talk to me, but nobody really knows me.  Well, aside from Robin, but I’m trying to branch out.”

“What, am I not good enough for you any more?” Robin asked as zhe formed into zhir indoor size with a festive blue, white, and orange color scheme.  “Is my jerky snark too much of a snarky jerk?”

“Ro- _ been,” _ Macy whined, putting a hand on the rainicorn-dog’s snout.  “You’re embarrassing me in front of my birdology hero.”

“Your birdology hero?”

“As of four minutes ago.”

Colla chuckled.  “You two are quite the package, aren’t you?  You’re just adorable!”

Macy started to protest, but Robin cut her off.  “Yep, that’s us, just two adorable peas in an adorably inseparable pod, come what may.”

“Oh, hey, do you know who else is adorable?” Colla asked.  “My daughter! You should come meet her.”

Macy gasped.  “I have a niece?”

Robin tilted zhir head in confusion.  “Macy, you already knew this. Pen talks about her all the time.  You gave her a high-five when she came in?”

Macy put her hands on her hips and smirked.  “Come on, you’d think that if I did something like that I’d remember.”

“I certainly would.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Colla.  “Speak of the little rascal, here she comes now!”

A small green peanut in a dirty blue dress came running up to the trio, followed by a beleaguered Lisby.  Upon seeing the girl’s mother, Lisby heaved a sigh of relief and wandered off to do whatever butlers do when nobody’s watching.  The little girl ran up to her mother, holding a blue-and-yellow wooden rocket ship above her head and blowing a raspberry. When she noticed Robin, she dropped the toy on the ground and started scratching zhir neck, giggling.

“Oh, yeah, that’s the spot,” said Robin, reflexively scratching zhir side with zhir hind paw.  “A little lower — a little — ooh, perfect.” Zhe shivered.

“Haha!” the girl laughed.  Then she looked up at Macy.  “What’s your name and stuff?”

“Oh, I’m M—”  She cut herself off, putting a finger up to tell herself to wait.  She had one opportunity to tell this kid what to call her, and she was going to use it.  “I’m Auntie Damy Awesomesauce,” she said. “She/her.”

“Wow.”  The kid slightly slowed down the scritches in awe.  “Are you the one who got all her arms and legs eaten by polecats?”

“That’s me,” said Macy, pointing at herself with her thumb in case there was any confusion as to who ‘me’ was.  “And what’s your stuff and stuff?”

“My name’s Penny,” said Penny.  “And same.”

_ Really, Penhaligon?  You couldn’t come up with anything better? _   “That’s a… that’s a name.  Is it short for anything?”

“Penne Pasta.”

“Algebraic.”

Penny skilted, halting the scritches to Robin’s annoyance.  “How is Damy short for Algebraic?”

“Um, via Korean?”

Robin nodded slightly in approval.  “You have done well, my apprentice,” zhe intoned.

Colla chortled, reminding Macy and Robin suddenly that the woman was present.  “Well, I should catch up with my husband,” she said as she turned to walk away, “but you three make with the friendliness.  Penny, Macy goes to the same school as you now, and she’s four grades above you, so you should both have a lot of guidance to give to each other in that vein.”

As soon as Colla was out of earshot, Macy turned to Penny.  “Hey, do you wanna go see Archie summon a demon?”

What happened next was a secret only shared between Macy, Robin, Penny, Archie, and Macy’s therapist the following Twosday.  Suffice it to say that from then on, Macy and Robin felt a certain protectiveness over Macy’s new niece, and none of them would look at Orzunoid the same way again.

* * *

More than the demonic samba dancers, however, what Robin couldn’t shake after that day was the ease with which Macy interacted with Penny.  When Macy had Masse to be friends with, Robin had been able to easily position zhirself as the smart one in the dynamic. When Macy found Huntress Wizard, who was  _ actually _ smart, Robin had fallen into Masse’s role as the bad-influence friend.  With Penny’s natural advantage as a small child, how could Robin hope to compete?  Zhe recalled Macy’s warning back in the Evil Forest, that zhe was growing too dependent on her.  Sure, zhe had staked all zhir happiness on zhir relationship with Macy, but zhe had never thought of that as a bad thing before.  This must be why she didn’t want zhir to drive people away. Robin had tried to provide something useful for Macy so that zhe was always necessary, but perhaps that wasn’t healthy.  Maybe codependency was a bad thing after all.

_ Crap, I’m going to need a second friend. _   Zhe would need one soon, too.  Judging from the few mealtime conversations zhe sat in on, Macy’s social life at school almost existed now.  A sense of urgency filled zhir, which of course meant zhe ended up delaying any activity for a fortnight, paralyzed by the fear of starting the journey of a thousand miles with a single step in the wrong direction.

The trouble was that there weren’t very many people zhe hadn’t been a prick to.  Zhe had wanted to form a rapport with Mél, but that relationship seemed unsalvageable for some reason zhe had no hope of understanding.  Jeff was nice enough, but things would probably always be awkward between them after that night zhe’d spent at his place. Charlie would be an ideal candidate, but Robin couldn’t be entirely sure she wasn’t a figment of zhir imagination — knowing Macy, the idea didn’t seem farfetched.  The ice cream man, Emile Cordobá, was another obvious choice, but his work took him all over the Mystery Mountains. And, of course, Bronwyn was just out of zhir league altogether.

Then when Replacethiswithabettername rolled around —  _ tourmaline _ this new calendar blew, had nobody proofread the days of the week? — zhe made a resolution.  It wasn’t necessarily a friend that zhe needed to make, it was another outlet of personal contact.  This broadened the possibilities greatly. More important than getting a constructive relationship was getting any before the increasing strain zhe put on zhir existing friendship with Macy caused it to snap.  With that in mind, zhe resolved to follow through on something zhe may or may not have discussed with Mél three and a half weeks prior (depending on whom you asked). Thus it was that on the 18th of Lyam, in the year 30 — no, seriously, this new calendar was awful, whose idea was it to change all the months as well as the lengths of the months and also keep track of years retroactively — Robin V. found zhirself waiting at the edge of the Jugland garden amidst the jangling chimes, waiting for Penhaligon to pass by on his way out.

Zhe didn’t have to wait long.  No more than thirty seconds after zhe arrived, he walked out, quietly whistling in an out-of-tune harmony with the hatchling jays.  The grating noise made Robin shudder involuntarily, and apparently visibly as well, for Pen stopped in his tracks and stared. “I hadn’t noticed you arrive,” he said.

“I should hope you hadn’t,” replied Robin.  “I’m a born hunter, bred for stealth, the essence of shadow and imperceptible void.”

“Canids are persistence hunters.  They don’t use ambush tactics.”

“Bah.  How do you know that, anyway?”

“My wife studies birds for a living.”

“Oh, well I guess that explains it.”  Zhe walked in a circle around the peanut, slowly stretching out to zhir full seven meters.  “Listen, Pen, we need to talk.”

“About what?  Cash Daniels?”  He raised an eyebrow and took a seat on Macy’s side opposite zhir face, crossing his legs and cupping his hands over his knee.  “Yes, I rather think that conversation is long overdue.”

“No, not — wait, what conversation?”

“You were so wheeled when I sent Macy to fetch her on her first day here, and you acted like it was because I put her in danger.  This despite the fact that I had no reason to believe there was  _ any _ level of danger involved.  Nary a week later, you take her off  _ for _ a week, traipsing about the Crystal Dimension and the flipping Evil Forest!  Either you have a weathervane for a moral compass, or you had an ulterior motive for your little outburst.”

The radial reddening of Robin’s stripes, originating at Pen, betrayed the fluster zhir face refused to show.  “And what motive would that be?”

“Your jealousy over her time, of course.”

“I’m not jealous of Cash.  Macy’s idol-of-the-week tends to come and go.  You want a weathervane? Ask Macy who the coolest person in the world is, aside from Finn and maybe now HW.”

“Oh, not her, no.  I think you’re jealous of me.”

The red fade equalized, and Robin’s color palette turned more pastel as zhe let out a breath zhe hadn’t realized zhe was holding.  “What, you actually think I’m jealous of you? Don’t overestimate yourself. If anything, I was jealous of  _ Macy _ and her ability to make connections so quickly with other people.”

“Was?”

“Was.  Not that that’s any of your business.”  Zhe bucked Pen off, causing him to stumble into the middle of zhir circle.  “Although as long as we’re talking about Cash, I’d like to take the opportunity to gloat about your failure to get Mél arrested for treason.  I bet you’re pretty disappointed with the way that trial ended.”

“Of course I’m not.”  Pen tried to find somewhere to put his hands, moving them every which way before ultimately just crossing his arms.  “Did you really think I wanted Mél to be a traitor? Did you think I would have expected it?”

“Well, I suppose n— wait, what was that last part?”

He put one hand on his side and held out the other as if to hand Robin a piece of wisdom.  “It’s a classic bargaining strategy. Open with a demand you consider unreasonable, and you can be talked down to what you actually want.  All I wanted to do was censure her for fraternizing with a married ambassador, and hopefully prevent such a gross conflict of interests from arising in the future.”  He chuckled. “Heh. Gross.”

“Yeah, that is pretty funny,” Robin conceded, compressing zhirself back to zhir indoor size.  “But wait, that whole thing with the treason charges was  _ mala fide _ the entire time?”

“There’s no law against a  _ mala fide _ allegation if you still have probable cause.”

“I hate that, and I hate you.”

“Yes, I figured as much.”

Then Robin walked up to him, planted a kiss on his cheek, and walked away, leaving him to stand in the garden until nightfall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll ship it. I mean, I should, seeing as I not only wrote this but had it in mind for a while, but still.
> 
> Any Homestucks in the audience, especially those who noticed the title of this chapter, should immediately know what's going on, but for all the rest: This is something called “spades romance”, “black romance”, or “kismesissitude”. It's basically just romance but with hate instead of love. I mean, sure, you could just say that it's “enemies to lovers” (or more accurately “enemies _while_ lovers”), but there's actually reason to believe classifying these kinds of feelings as their own entity, different from yet parallel to romantic love, is meaningful. Astute readers may remember that this isn't the first kismesis pair in the story — back in Chapter 2 we had Cash Daniels and Penelope Farthing. That was actually foreshadowing this.
> 
> Meanwhile, Robin continues to make me say “what the fuck?” I should clarify that Robin isn't lying that zhir brother died, but zhe's twisting the truth to an insane degree because zhe wants to connect emotionally to Mél (to get her off zhir case). Kids, don't try this at home, for the love of Tourmaline.
> 
> A lot of time passed this chapter, and that's because I'm trying to catch up to myself. When I published Chapter 4, I established approximately how long it would be until Macy's thirteenth birthday, but the intent was that the distance between the events of that chapter and her birthday would be exactly the distance between the publication of that chapter and the publication of Macy's birthday chapter — and I know exactly when in the story outline Macy's birthday chapter falls. What this essentially means is that I need to massively accelerate the passage of time if I'm going to live up to that schedule without pulling a six month timeskip like that one episode of the show that had a six month timeskip.
> 
> We had a lot of characters returning as cameos this time — even friggin' Jeff the Karuka, who apparently has slept with Robin. Jugland is a vast and complicated place, unfortunately. I also dropped in a couple new characters for some bizarre reason, but the one I want to talk about is Penne Pasta Jugland. This latest member of the peanut gallery was one of the early ideas I had for the story, back when there wasn't going to _be_ a plot to speak of. She was originally going to be a pretty regular presence as the “little kid” character, being a constant source of cuteness and maybe even tagging along on some of Macy's adventures.
> 
> Globs, that would have been awful, especially since I have zero experience writing that sort of thing. Penne Pasta, you're going to have to stay a minor character, at least for now.
> 
> Archie, on the other hand, is turning out to be a bit more relevant than I had anticipated. Macy looks up to her now, she's got some sort of dynamic with Vesper (which is more than anyone else can say), her relationships with Galé and her dad have both carried the scene forward at times, and she's absolutely right about the hereditary monarchy and she should say it. Plus she's a teenager so she carries drama (read: narrative tension) around wherever she goes. She's the Mél of the Jugland family.
> 
> Your preview:  
> The rhythmic movements of untrained instinct formed a percussive, dancelike pattern, weaving order and harmony from discord and violence. If there were some witness who could record and recount this, perhaps it could even seem beautiful, and to a twenty-first century viewer, oddly familiar.


	12. Catbells

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trying to make friends at school, Macy gets drawn into a turf war between two cliques led by upperclassmen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is kind of a weird chapter. We've moved out of our first eight-parter, so it's time to shift gears back into a more episodic story format, so I feel like I should give a heads-up: This chapter, in particular, is _very_ episodic, even moreso than usual. I've gotten some nice character development in for the main characters, so for this one we're kind of taking a break from that and getting a better look at Jugland as a whole. If you're the kind of person who incorrectly thinks Steven Universe and Avatar: The Last Airbender have filler episodes, this chapter is not for you.
> 
> The discussion question for this chapter: What's your favorite folktale from your region (or a region you have some cultural connection to), if you know of any?

Macy sat in the front of the classroom in a desk that was barely large enough to fit her ellipsoid-shaped body, hastily scribbling a shorthand version of what the teacher had written on the board into her thick, pungent spiral notebook.  She wasn’t quite sure why the pages of this particular notebook she had been lent by a bookish flaxseed smelled so strongly of honey and mildew, nor why that smell grew stronger as the tip of her pencil traced across the page, but she was grateful for it.  Off-putting as it was, it helped keep her grounded. Between the drone of the students behind her and the visual static of white chalk on black slate at the front of the room, she sometimes had trouble maintaining lucidity; focusing on the distinct smell of the hand-me-down notebook almost always helped buoy her conscious mind above the sea of waking dreams that crashed around her, threatening to pull her under.

She took a sniff, and the ocean faded from her touch.  A few of her peers giggled. Macy tried to ignore them, focusing on what her therapist had said in their second meeting last week.  It wasn’t that they were judging her necessarily, so much as she was simply noticeable. Sniffing a notebook was an objectively unusual thing to do, so it was no surprise they found it humorous.  Still, she couldn’t help but resent them for their reaction. She was doing what Dr. Upe had told her not to do — constructing barriers based on her perceptions of other people’s behaviors in a way that would only widen the gap.  She didn’t care. She was allowed her irrational barriers.

No sooner had Macy finished copying down what was on the chalkboard than the teacher, a blocky ice elemental with a thick Yiddish accent, began speaking in that voice like winter wind through trees.  “Moving on from that. I’m sure you all remembered to bring in your copy of  _ Kitties, Mitties, and Jitties: An Anthology of Sorts _ by T. Princess.”

Macy had not.  Every Oneday Mx. Coyfield asked this, and every Oneday half the class, including Macy, pretended to shuffle through their backpacks to look busy as if xe didn’t realize how many of them had left that book at home or in their lockers.  Twosday through Saturfriday they did much better, but over the weekend it was like a switch flipped in their brains preventing them from being fully prepared for the upcoming week, no matter how much they wanted to (which was usually not very much if Macy were to be honest with herself).

_ “Oy vey,” _ xe said, shaking xyr head.  “Those of you who  _ do _ have it, please turn to page 183.  This week we’ll be discussing a story that comes from around here, ‘The Magpie and the Mountain Jay.’  You all should have read this section over the weekend, so on the off-chance that one of you actually did, would anyone like to explain what it is before we begin reading?  Yes, you in the back, Ezekiel.”

Macy turned in her chair with a faint scraping noise to focus on Ezekiel.  He was a short, stocky pinto bean who wore a black leather bike jacket, tinted aviator sunglasses, and a freshly-coiffed pompadour hairpiece at all times, even during gym class (he had a doctor’s note).  He was sitting with his feet propped up on his desk like a recliner, one hand raised lazily behind his head. He had an insufferable smirk that was as much a part of his brand as any other element of his wardrobe.

“Sure thing, teach,” he said in a careless drawl, half-lidded eyes panning over the classroom as if searching for anyone who had the poor taste to not hang on his every word.  “A’course I know what the story’s about. S’about a magpie an’ a mountain jay, an’ how one of ‘em kept picken’ up shiny shiz fer its joint. S’why we’ve got the jay on the big dumb gate outside or whatever, ‘cuzza that story representin’ our town’s metamorphic attraction ta resplenderificness or whatever.”

“Well, aren’t you quite the maven,” said Mx. Coyfield before erasing the notes on the blackboard.  “T. Princess does indeed make the claim that the folktale represents a materialistic ethos of the region, serving as a  _ metaphor _ for the attraction to  _ resplendence _ and citing the aforementioned ‘big dumb gate’ as an example of this.  However, as we explored last week in the myth of Hansel and the Seven Gretels, stories like this can often have multiple meanings over time, or even no intrinsic meaning at all.  The earliest recorded version of the magpie & mountain jay story appears in a collection of bedtime stories that predate the founding of Jugland. Those of you who don’t have books, pair up with someone who does, and we’ll go around class and do a popcorn reading of it and then a discussion.  Ready?”

* * *

“I wasn’t ready,” Macy sighed as she set down her tray of bean-only chili and cornbread at the end of a long table in the crowded cafeteria.  “Literature class is way different than I’m used to. Am I the only person who’s having trouble following what’s going on basically at all times in that class?”

“Nopesolutely,” replied the scrawny wheat stalk she had sat down across from, a mug of black coffee in front of her.  Sprightly was one of the few students at the school who had as few friends as Macy. She had also been one of the classmates who helped get her caught up, and when the others inevitably defaulted back to their existing circles of friends for the most part, Sprightly defaulted to sticking with Macy.  Even so, it had taken her a fortnight to actively initiate any conversation at all with the nut. Macy made an effort to always ask her a question as soon as they got within earshot of each other. She had learned the hard way that the only alternative was awkward silence that was somehow worse for having two parties involved.

Macy pressed further.  “So you’re struggling too, then?”

“Oh, w-well, I’m not, but I h-hear that some others are.  I’m h-helping tutor some of them. You know,” said Sprightly, letting that last thought trail into silence.

“I just get a lot of mixed signals, because Mx. Coyfield sounds like xe’s contradicting xyr own assigned reading.”  Macy figured that outright saying  _ “I want to have an actual conversation with you for once” _ might be rude.  “Is that kind of thing normal?”

“Not really.”

“Okay, uh.”  Macy had to pick another topic; if she started eating before Sprightly started talking, there wouldn’t be any lunch conversation at all.  “What’s with that one kid, Ezekiel? Did he  _ actually _ do the reading?  He seems like the kind of guy who would forge a doctor’s note saying he’s too cool for school.”

“How do you know about that incident?”

“I’m sorry, what?”  Macy carved out a spoonful of beans, then paused.  “Actually, never mind that. Are you tutoring him?”

“Cruft, I never could.  H-he’s the younger brother of Jordathan, l-leader of the Revs.”

“Mmm?,” asked Macy, spoon in mouth.

“O-oh, did nobody tell y-you about the Revs?  They’re basically a gang made up of—”

Macy spat out her chili, spoon and all.  “There’s a  _ gang _ at this school!?”

“Two, a-actually.  The Revs and the Rads.  Between them they control the school, dominating their r-respective ends of the playground and declaring w-which version of four-square we’re allowed to play.”

“Why has nobody put a stop to this?”

“N-nobody wants to.  They help sneak snacks into school, set up f-forgery rings for doctor’s notes, bribe the l-lunch ladies to improve the meal, schedule fire drills to h-happen on the same days as midafternoon band concerts, all the u-usual stuff.”

“Okay then, I guess that explains everything.”  Macy took a bite out of her cornbread. “At first I thought you meant there was, like, violence going on.”

“There’s definitely a l-little of that too.”

“Oh man, that’s even cooler!  I mean, uh, how terrible.”

“Macy, you’re…”  Sprightly looked up at her, pleading in her eyes.  “You’re not going to try to get m-mixed up with them, a-are you?”

Macy spun her spoon, accidentally flinging droplets chili sauce everywhere.  “Please, I’m a pro-body trained in the natural arts. It’s basically my duty to get mixed up in stuff like this.”

A voice came from behind her, cold and brittle.  “Oh, so  _ la princesa _ thinks she can tango on over to our quaint little dispute, no?”

Macy turned around to see a marshmallow in simple purple robes, flanked by a pair of fire and water elementals wearing loose tank-tops with each others’ elemental symbols.  She had seen these three around occasionally; everyone else went quiet when they walked by, and even from the corner of her eye she could tell Sprightly was quivering in fear.  Macy, having slain a dragon 35 days ago, was unimpressed. She glanced the marshmallow up and down.  _ Yeah, I could take ‘em. _   “What’s it to ya?”

“First of all, you got your bean juice on my  _ camiseta.” _   They gestured to a barely-visible speck on the sleeve of their shirt.  “Secondly, I would very much not appreciate you to meddle in the affairs of the Rads, no matter your curiosity.”  They made a pushing-away hand motion. “Our squabble need not concern you.”

“Now what’s that supposed to mean?”  Macy stood up, standing on the bench-seat to give herself some extra height.  The added verticality would give her the appearance of being larger than she actually was, a tactic used to scare away predators in the wild such as ambassadors and road signs.  “I’m a student at this school. Your squabbles are my squabbles.”

_ “¡Qué sorpresa!” _ they exclaimed, putting their hands on the side of their slack-jawed face in mock shock.  “It appears that there must have been some confusion as to your situation, for which I offer my deepest condolences.”  The elementals behind them snickered.

“Huh?” Macy skilted.

“I know very well who you are, Macadamia Jugland.  You are a  _ marquesa, _ with your great massive castle.  You should not pry into the affairs of us  _ plebeyos; _ you would not want to chip a nail.”  And with that they spun around and walked away.

“Who was that?” Macy asked without turning around.

“That w-w-was Astrida Compela,” said Sprightly, voice quivering.  “Y-you just talked back to the l-l-leader of the Rads.”

“Huh.”  Macy should probably have been impressed by that, but this whole scenario seemed rather tame.  “Say, was there something familiar about that flame elemental?”

“Oh, y-yeah, Coalby.  He’s o-one of the people I tutor for Mx. Coyfield’s l-literature class.”  Sprightly’s voice got smaller. “W-wait, I tutored one of the R-rads’ lieutenants in l-literature.”

“That’s pretty algebraic,” said Macy, turning back to give her friend an approving nod, but the wheat stalk had already fainted from retroactive shock.

* * *

Sprightly woke up on a bed in the nurse’s office, feeling green.  That was a relief; sometimes she got brown and crackly after fainting.  Macy must have gotten her to the nurse’s office impossibly quick, or else she knew something of tending to plants.  The digital clock on the wall let her know it was 3:15, so school had let out a quarter of an hour ago. She didn’t hear any activity in the nurse’s office other than the clattering of the secretary’s keyboard — she had been sent here often enough to distinguish the various keyboards by their distinctive clattering noises — but as she lifted her head, she saw a note written in green ink on the table.

Reluctant to leave the comfort of the bed, she belabored a moment before neatly extracting herself from the covers and hopping over to the table, reading the note without touching it.  “Gone fishing. Don’t leave until I get back, but in case you inevitably do: Energy balance was out of alignment — renew your ethylene prescription, get more sunlight. Also, I’ve told you to cut back on coffee before; now I’m telling the lunch lady.”

_ You can’t tell me what to do! _ Sprightly thought, but she immediately thought otherwise.  The nurse just wanted to keep her safe, and they probably knew a lot more about her health than she did; after all, they had already went to school for this, whereas Sprightly was only thinking about maybe doing that some day if she didn’t spontaneously combust from sheer embarrassment before then, or possibly get hit by a strong breeze and snap in half with a crackle like freshly-poured pop.

As she left the nurse’s office in a daze, she barely registered the secretary telling her that her cousin had stopped by to pick up her missed assignments for her.  She walked right past a worried Macy, giving her a dismissive thumbs-up to let her friend know she was fine, totally. How could something like this happen to her? She hated taking ethylene, which was acidic and bitter, unlike coffee, which was acidic and bitter but in a good way and not a bad way.  And getting natural sunlight? Where was she supposed to do that, outside? Outside is for farmers and hobos and whatever kind of person Macy is. And how could she cope with the fainting spells brought on in large part by her overconsumption of coffee if she wasn’t allowed to drink coffee?

It was in this mindset, half-awake, mind clouded by worries, yet with more energy than she usually had, that Sprightly made a decision she would never normally make.  When she exited the large front doors of the school, she turned left and walked over to the public basketweavingball court adjacent to the school.

As she expected, there were several figures malingering on the other side of the fence, all nuts and legumes.  A karuka in a red varsity jacket was stuffing a pixie stick for a buff cashew in out-of-season wool. A facially-scarred almond pried bolts out of a bench while a macadamia with a seeing-eye penguin tinkered with some manner of metallic flower crown.  Nearby, a walnut and a pinto bean kicked a hackeysack forth and back, while another, smaller bean sat off to the side examining a wildflower, obviously disinterested. Despite their leisurely activities, their posture and attire still conveyed a somewhat intimidating aura.  Had Sprightly been more lucid, this might have fazed her.

“I need a favor,” she droned, not sure what she meant even as she said it.

The walnut kicked the hackeysack into their companion’s face, knocking them over, before approaching Sprightly with their arms crossed and their mouth curled into a professional frown.  “The Revs don’t do favors,” they announced in the same tone one would use to say, “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.” “We do deals and promises. No favors, no threats.”

“I need a deal, then.”  Immediately, she froze. This was stupid.  Why was she here? She wanted to faint again, but she couldn’t do that on command.  She had to say something, anything.  _ But what? _   An idea popped into her head, which for all she knew may or may not have been the reason she came here.  “Can y-you smuggle me some coffee tomorrow m-morning? The nurse cut o-off my supply.”

The walnut raised an eyebrow.  It was obvious to them that this manner of speaking didn’t come natural to the wheat before them.  Either way, they didn’t really care much, but it was odd nonetheless. “That’s within our power. The going price on coffee is ten candy wrappers a cup.  That acceptable?”

“Suretainly.”

“Naturally, we will require a favor in exchange.”

_ A favor?  In addition to the price? _   Sprightly had run out of courage, however, so she merely said, “N-naturally.”

The walnut paused, stroking their chin as if they hadn’t actually thought of what the favor would be before asking for one.  “You’re friends with Macadamia the Nut, right? I confess to have taken a bit of an interest in her over the past weeks.”

“Like, romantically?”

“That’s for me to know and you to shut up.  Compel her toward the Revs, or at least get her interested in the idea.  We’ll approach her at the upcoming Caturday Dance with a formal offer.”

“Don’t y-you mean Caturfriday?”

They fanned their hand in front of their nose and grimaced.  “Don’t talk to me about the new calendar, it’s awful. But what’s not awful is this deal.  If you make an effort to evangelize us to Macy, I promise you a steady supply of coffee for the rest of your time at this school.”  They narrowed their eyes, their whole body suddenly tensing. “And France Appalachian keeps their promises.”

As Sprightly walked away, the pinto bean who had been playing hackeysack with France got up off the ground.  “Yo, what’s with you makin’ deals of that magnitude widdout consultin’ me first? This some sort of coup?”

“What?”  France spun around and put on their best offended face.  “Don’t be ridiculous, Jordathan. I’m just trying to acquire an advantage against the Rads.  Surely you understand the importance of that.”

“S’pose that makes sense.”  He picked up the hackeysack and tossed it between his hands, appraising its weight.  “Even so, I must confess to a twillbe o’ disappointment. As my second-in-command, I expect you to be plotting my usurpation at all times.”  He pointed to the other pinto bean over by the flower.  “Even my younger bro’s been think’ about it, an’ ‘e’s not even really a member o’ the gang.”

“Mostly I’ve been thinkin’ about how if I stole the keys to yer golf cart, I wouldn’t have to wait up after shool,” said Ezekiel.  “But whatevs, y’all go nerd it up, I ain’t care.”

“Excellent,” France cackled, steepling their fingers.  “Then soon, the playground will be ours, and nobody will ever play the four-square variant where you can hit the ball after it’s touched your body and then hit your square without having hit your square before the first time you touched it  _ for the remainder of the academic year!” _

* * *

For the rest of the week, Macy noticed that Sprightly was even more of a chipmunk than usual, darting away whenever anyone approached her; paradoxically, she was also much more active in conversing with Macy during lunch.  The topic of conversation was consistently inconsistent, ranging from asking her what she intended to do for the Caturfriday Dance to suggesting that she get involved with extracurriculars (apparently going out into the forest and thinking about squirrels didn’t count).

“What were you thinking?” Macy was asking, the Saturfriday before the dance.  “Sports? M&M? Archery? Actually,  _ do _ we have an archery club?”

“Oh, n-no,” replied Sprightly, her eyes looking left and right as if worried someone else might overhear.  “At least, I don’t think we h-have one anymore, ever since the i-incident.”

“…well, alright, then.  What did you have in mind?”

“Nothing in particular,” she lied.  “But o-on the off-chance you were maybe possibly considering allying w-with any sort of non-school-sponsored group with some m-measure of influence over school politics—”

“I deal with enough politics as it is.”

“—y-yes, well, if you change your m-mind, there might be somebody who would be interested i-in approaching you during the dance pertaining to something in that orientation.”

“?”

“.”

“I always love our little talks.”  Macy took a bite of her tofu cubano.  She cringed at the taste. “Eugh, these sandwiches are awful.  I should try to join one of the gangs up here just so I can help smuggle better food in here.”

A familiar voice from behind said,  _ “Ay, _ and the little  _ marquesa _ hasn’t learned to mind her own royal business.”  Macy turned around to see Astrida in a faded yellow hoodie dress, Coalby and his icy counterpart once again flanking her.  “It is  _ linda _ how you think you can interfere,” she said, booping Macy’s nut snoot, “but  _ linda _ will not spare you the consequences of careless meddling.”

“I don’t need anyone named Linda to save me,” said Macy, narrowing her eyes.  “And if you’re so worried about me joining up with the Revs, maybe you should try to recruit me instead of antagonizing me.”

“It is not that I do not want you to ally with those  _ pintamonas,” _ she said in a tone that let Macy know ‘pintamonas’ was not a compliment.  “It is that I do not want you to be involved at all. A girl of your stature would simply make a fool of herself thinking she knows what is best for people.”  With that, she turned around, swishing her hoodie dress dramatically as she walked away. The ice elemental blew a wintry raspberry as they left.

“Harumph,” Macy harumphed.  “Listen to her, talking like she knows me.  I was joking before, but now I really  _ do _ want to join the Revs, just because it’d jingle her bells.”

_ I’m awesome at this, _ thought Sprightly, having successfully fooled herself into believing she in any way contributed to that outcome.

* * *

A small-horned, pastel-colored unicorn walked up to the front of the school in the dusty hues of the coward’s sunset, taking a seat by the darkened door through which could be heard the sounds of electrohootenanny music and cat sounds.  Nearby, a small gaggle of students who had gone outside to breathe in the crisp evening air or wander through the school’s rock garden gasped in awe at the sight. As zhe sat, the unicorn dumped off zhir two passengers before reverting back to zhir full, seven-and-a-quarter-meter length.  Zhe gave the larger of the two nuts a noogie before helping them both up onto their feet and slithering off.

Macy gave a thumbs-up in acknowledgement of her onlookers as she took Penny’s clammy hand and started leading her into the school.  “Do you recognize any of them?” she whispered.

“One or two,” Penny whispered back.  “Will this really make me popular, Aunt Damy?”

“If sitcoms have taught me anything, no, but you’ll learn a valuable lesson about how the real popularity was inside you all along.”  She pushed open the doors of the school and stepped inside, where Penny reluctantly let go of her hand. “There you go,” said Macy. “One successful escorting to the Caturfriday Dance.  It’s not so bad, is it?”

The school was nearly unrecognizable.  In the two days school had been cancelled leading up to the interkingdom day of veneration for felines, the decorating committee had done a complete overhaul of the entire building.  Demotivational posters were hanging on every wall. Pawprint stickers were placed strategically on all the windows. Lifelike statues dotted the corridors. There was even a large fresco above the lobby depicting a single cat living through each of its nine incarnations in nine different regions of Ooo.

“I’m still scared,” said Penny with a nervous jitter.  “What if someone’s mean to me?”

“I’ll beat them up.”

“What if I’m mean to someone else?”

A beat.  “Please don’t be?”

The little peanut pulled down her eyelid with one finger and blew a raspberry.  “I will make no such promise.”

As Macy chased after her giggling niece, elsewhere in the party Ezekiel was leaning against the wall by a table of refreshments, holding his head.  He’d drunk some fruit punch, but it had a little too much kick, and now between the unpleasant aftertaste and the loud music he was beginning to get sensory overload.

Jordathan and a kola nut Ezekiel didn’t recognize waltzed up, arms locked and legs flowing, keeping in perfect time with the music.  “Yo, bro, you okay?” asked Jordathan.

“Urgh, no!” Ezekiel groaned, sliding down the wall.  There was a crinkling sound as a power behind him got unstuck from the wall and clung onto the back of his leather jacket.  “I wanna head out. Can we skip to the ain’t be here no more?”

“Brighten up a twibble, won’t ya?  It’s a party. Get outta yer own head.”

“What the dreck are you meanin’?”

Jordathan shrugged and waltzed away.  Ezekiel half-sat, half-skilted, trying to puzzle out what it could possibly mean to get out of his own head when he hadn’t even been shrunken down and trapped inside of it, until he felt a warm hand on his shoulder accompanied by a soft leathery sizzle.

“Hey, uh, are you okay Zeke?” asked Coalby, his lit tutor.

“What’s it look—”  He took a deep breath and started again.  “No, not really. Well, mostly; real candid, I’m sorta actin’ up how wheeled I really feeled.”

“Alright, I get that.  Because when you only show the exact amount of emotion you’re actually feeling, people care even less than they should, right?”

Ezekiel looked the flameling in his smoldering eyes, his own eyes starting to sting from the light and also some mild searing pain on his shoulder.  “Yo, you really  _ get _ it!”

“Well, sure.  It’s just simple psychology, after all.  The need for validation is just as valid as any other.”  Coalby sniffed as a bit of smoke drifted past his insubstantial nostrils; he suddenly retracted his hand, jumping back in startlement and gaping at the scorch mark he had left on the shoulder of Ezekiel’s jacket.  “Whoa, sorry about that, dude. I guess I can get kinda hyperfocused.”

“Heh.  That’s prob’ly why I’m needin’ ya to tutor me.  You can actually focus on Mx. Coyfield’s incoherent monologues.”

Coalby smirked.  “Don’t blame xem, blame whoever decided everyone our age needed to learn comparative folklore.”  He extended a hand and helped pull Ezekiel back onto his feet, where the bean immediately resumed leaning against the wall.  “Hey,” he asked, “I was gonna go up to the refreshments table and get some drinks, do you want anything?”

“Nah, but thanks,” replied Ezekiel.  “Not really feelin’ it right now. The punch is pretty lousy.”

“I’ll take your word for it, seeing as I don’t touch the stuff myself.”

“No foolin’?”

“Yeah, I’m diabetic.”  He took a step toward the refreshment table, then twisted to face Ezekiel one more time.  “Hey, that guy who walked up to you before I came over looked somewhat familiar. Was that—?”

“Jordathan, my older bro,” said Ezekiel.

“Oh, good,” Coalby chuckled, “for a minute I thought he was the Revs’ leader, Jordathan.”  A beat. “Wait, crap.”

“Yeah, my bro’s pretty scary,” Ezekiel agreed.  “You’ve got no idea how much hassle I had to wrassle just so I could get tutoring without lettin’ him know so’s he could vet you.  He’s pretty overbearin’ an’ so I didn’t want my tutor to have to deal with that kinda pressure. Yer welcome.”

“No, you don’t get it.”  Coalby’s flame had died down somewhat; he was releasing more smoke than fire, and his voice was the hissing sizzle of fading embers.  “I’m part of the Rads.”

“Oh.  Well then I  _ definitely _ don’t want my bro findin’ out about ya.”

“Both of our gangs would slam their collective (and respective) cans if they found out we were seeing each other.”

“Seein’?”  Ezekiel raised an eyebrow.  “I thought this was a strictly professional relationship, good sirrah.”

“Oh, I, uh, um…”  Coalby flared up again, answering Ezekiel’s unspoken question about whether it was possible for fire to blush.  “That’s what I meant, totally. Slip of the—”

“Yer cute when yer flustered.”  Suddenly the mellifluous melodrama of the electrohootenany tune didn’t seem so grating to the bean.  He heard the singer belt out a line about how they “missed the old road they once called home,” and he thought that maybe he could find a road to call his own.

Meanwhile, Macy was attempting to harmonize the song to impress a group of other students.  One or two had approached when Macy began talking to one of the special guest cats scattered about the party, but once she started singing to impress the uninterested feline, a crowd began to accumulate.  Never having heard the song before, Macy found it difficult to guess what pitch she would need to sing, let alone in what rhythm, but somehow she doubted she’d get a much better reaction out of the cat even if she were the songwriter themself.

One unexpectedly intense bridge pickup later, she suddenly found her voice hoarse, so she left to go find a drinking fountain, promising to resume her serenade once she was no longer parched.  The cat looked up at her, blinked slowly, then began licking its paws. Unsure if the slow blink signalled boredom, Macy resolved to not take too long at the fountain.

That plan was complicated when an almond in a large red trenchcoat stepped out in front of her, seemingly materializing from nowhere, a crimson scarf pulled up to conceal most of their face.  “Are you Qventin Boczniak?” e asked, eir voice raspy and muffled. “I vould speak vith you.”

“Oh, uh, no, sorry,” said Macy, sidestepping around and pointing in the direction she was pretty sure the water fountain probably was.  “I’ve gotta go.”

“No, no, I get it.”  E put eir hands up, a motion which emphasized how massive eir sleeves were.  “There are others I seek. Are you Kay Riers?”

“Still no.”  She began walking backwards, slowly picking up speed.

“Er, Macadamia Jugland?”

“No.”

“Hannah McHa—”

“Wait, no, sorry!”  She slapped herself on the forehead and let out a wry laugh.  “I  _ am _ Macadamia.  I guess I’m just used to everyone calling me Macy.  Anyway, bye!” She spun around and began walking away again.

“Vait!”  At the sound of eir voice, Macy halted in her tracks, annoyed at how much cat time this interaction was subtracting from her day.  “I am called Truffle, e/em. I vould speak vith you on behalf of the Revs. Ve have an offer ve vould vish to vextend.”

“Vhat are you talking about?  I mean, what.”

“Did the vheat girl not inform you as she said she vould about our interest in you?”

Macy remembered what Sprightly had told her last week.  “Oh, she did; I just didn’t think it was serious.”

“It vas.  Do you have a response prepared?”

“I don’t know.  Can I get back to you later?”

“It is important that ve get your response now.  Surely a veek is all the time you need to decide.  You vould only be a probationary member anyvay. It mostly consists of assisting vith logistics and rounding out parts for the upcoming play.”

Macy began walking backwards again.  “I’m already a protector of the forest.  Isn’t that an, erhem, conflict of interests?”

“Vhy should it be?  Ve do not threaten the forest.”

“And what about my status as a member of the ducal household?”

Truffle put eir hands on the side of eir head in mock horror.  “Oh no, vhat a travesty! Now ve vould have a direct line to the most powerful household in the city!”

“I take your point.  Hrrm.”  _ Just say whatever will let you get back to the cat faster. _   “Alright, then.  I’ll do it.”

“A vise decision.”  E began rummaging through eir deep trenchcoat pockets, finally pulling out a matte crimson flip phone.  “Let me enter your number here so that ve can contact you.” But Macy had already left to go quench her thirst.

_ Oh vell, _ thought Truffle as e truffle shuffled back into the crowd.   _ It shouldn’t be too difficult to get in touch vith her.  There are only so many students here. _   E felt a twinge at the corner of eir mouth that signified satisfaction with a job well done.  Either that or eir massive, disfiguring facial scar got caught on eir scarf again. No, wait, it was definitely that second one.

Covertly, e tugged the scarf a couple centimeters away from eir face and fiddled with eir scar tissue.  E knew e wasn’t supposed to do that, but e felt like it helped even though it almost certainly didn’t. E liked the illusion of control.  E wondered if the knowledge that the control was an illusion meant it wouldn’t be as effective. So much of the way the mind perceives things is based on the subconscious mind that what the conscious mind was focused on almost didn’t matter.  For example, even though e was pondering the metapsychology of the placebo effect, e could still effortlessly navigate the crowd without bumping into anybody.

Until e bumped into somebody, immediately falling onto eir nut rear as eir scarf was jostled loose.  E frantically scrambled to get it wrapped around eir face again, but it had gotten caught on one of his buttons.   _ Betrayed by my own vardrobe! _   “I apologize,” e mumbled as e rolled back upright.  “By the vay, are you Qventin Boczniak?”

E immediately knew that the person before em was not Quentin Boczniak.  Instead, glowering over em with a spite-soaked grimace was a squirrel wearing a tweed jacket and a backwards baseball cap, her bushy tail wrapped diagonally across her chest like a sash.  “Oh, I’m sure you’d  _ love _ to talk to him right about now,” she said in a fast, nasally voice.  “Surely the great and noble Revs aren’t thinking of something so lowly as breaking the rules of engagement, are they?”

“Be not so quick to asperse, Claire,” replied Truffle, attempting to cover eir facial scarring with eir scrawny little arms, a task which would be considerably easier if eir sleeves didn’t keep falling down to eir shoulders.  “Ve do not intend to defy the terms ve have so carefully negotiated vith you. Your part of the school is, regretfully, yours. Ve have other reasons to vant our netvork to expand.”

“Oh-ho-ho.”  Claire wagged her finger, and the fur on her tail spiked up.  “Don’t think I believe that for a second, oh no. You’re always gettin’ right on all up in on our case about how the Rads supposedly muscle in on your muscle and whatnot, but personally?  I think y’all just don’t know how to share. Seriously, give a Rad a meter and they think they’re owed a kilo. I’m surprised y’all haven’t yet tried to take credit for foundin’ the flippin’ school.”

“Vas there a point to these baseless invectives?”

“You bet your overdramatic butt there is.  It’s to say that we’re on to y’all and your little game.  There’s a storm brewin’ in the brewin’ chambers of this school, and when it breaks y’all won’t be the only ones with fresh new fortifications to weather the weather out in.  Out. Um.” Claire grabbed the end of her tail and wiped her brow. “Pretend that last sentence was exactly the same except I didn’t lose track of where I was toward the end, ‘kay?”

“I vill absolutely, definitely, not do that.”

“Alright then, but I’m going to report back on what you’ve been doing, and just so you know, this means war.”  She whirled around and stormed off, before pausing and storming back on. “To be clear, it’s not you not ignoring my little slip; the whole ‘declaration of war’ thing is more about the fact that—”

“Yes, I get it,” said Truffle, finally getting eir scarf over eir face.  “I assume there is no vay I can talk you and your comrades out of this.”

“Can you promise, with full and righteous authorization from the top, that y’all won’t try an’ recruit more folk from under our curious little noses?”

“I do not know, can you promise not to be a little tranch about our business?”

Carol huffed and stormed off for real at that.  Truffle tugged at eir scarf again. Maybe e could have been a little more diplomatic about that and potentially avoided another incident.   _ Oh vell _ .  E shrugged and went back to eir favorite empty corridor, waiting for someone who looked like they might be a Quentin to pass by.

* * *

Next Threesday, when Ezekiel waited in the corner of the lunchroom for his tutoring session to begin, Coalby was five minutes late.  Given Caturfriday’s revelations, this wasn’t at all surprising. When the fire elemental finally arrived, he had ditched his signature ice-themed ensemble.  Instead, he wore a cream-colored tank top, a baby blue skirt, and mirrored sunglasses. The way he kept adjusting the straps on the tank top, it was obvious he hadn’t actually worn it before today and was still struggling to get it to fall comfortably.  Besides that, he walked with an exaggerated swagger, as if trying to stand out so much that people would ignore him for being too obvious about drawing attention to himself. If the brief glances and subsequent chair-shifting-away from the other study pairs were anything to go by, he was succeeding at that.

“Yo,” Ezekiel whispered as Coalby sat down with a curtsy, “are you really tryin’ ta go incognito?  Listen, if my bro hasn’t figured out who ya are by now, through whatever inscrutable gambit of fortune, yer prob’ly safe.”

“Maybe,” Coalby whispered back.  “There might be a mite more to it, but I should let your bro be the one to tell you.”  He tilted his sunglasses up onto his forehead, then reached into his messenger bag and pulled out  _ Kitties, Mitties, and Jitties. _   “Alright,” he said at a more normal volume, leafing through the hefty tome, “this week’s folktale is on page 215, right?”

“Yeah, that sounds about right.”  Ezekiel scanned the notebook page containing the dinosaurs he’d doodled during class, then ripped it out and shoved it into his mouth before Coalby could get a chance to see it.  “Sho why awe ya sho mush be’er at thish shtuff anyway?” he slurred.

“Hm?”  Coalby paused his page-turning, letting the book close on his finger, as he decrypted the question.  “Oh, I don’t know. I just think this kind of thing is fascinating. Stories and stuff. My guardian used to tell me all kinds of stories about the stories she used to hear back in the Flame Kingdom.  Some of those stories sounded really cool, and I’d love to be able to create something that cool some day. Actually,” he said, blushing, “I’ve written some stories myself.”

Ezekiel swallowed.  “What about?”

“Well, there’s this one story I’ve been working on set in a universe where everyone’s human, because I think humans are neat.  In it, there’s this really nerdy human from out of town who meets this really cool human at school and they fall in love even though they’re opposites, but their respective friends don’t like each other, and so—”  Coalby looked up to see that characteristic satisfied smirk on Ezekiel’s face and blushed harder. “Um!”

“I like the sound o’ that one.  D’ya know how it ends?”

“N-not yet.  I like to, uh, figure that out as I go.”

Ezekiel leaned over the table and whispered into Coalby’s ear.  “Wanna find out?”

“I…”  Coalby burned brighter, warping the edges of his sunglasses.  “I do wanna find out. I wanna find all the out.”

“Next ‘Bettername.  Fountain plaza. Be sure y’ain’t been got followed.  Bring flowers. I like poinsettas.”

“Poinsettas.”  Coalby tensed up, forcing his flames to die down, then pulled out a notebook and started scribbling in it.  “Noted. How do you feel about getting a start on this review session because we’re already ten minutes late?”

“Jazzy.  Let’s do it.”

* * *

Dr. Upe cleared his throat as Macy loudly closed the door behind her.  “You’re ten minutes late, Macadamia,” said the mottled hickory nut as xe peered over the rims of xyr rhinestone-studded spectacles from behind xyr rosewood desk.  “Did you run into a spot of trouble on your way here?”

“No, sir,” replied Macy, sloughing off her book bag as she collapsed onto the leather couch before rolling off it.  Grunting, she pulled herself back up, grabbing onto the back to stop herself from falling a second time. “Just had to help my niece talk to one of her teachers.  Quite a boisterous girl, but dreadfully shy in crowds. She reminds me of herself when I was her age.” She sighed, letting go of the back of the couch and sinking deep into the cushion.  “Ah, to be young again.”

“Jazzy.”  Xe leafed through a notebook in front of xem, clicking xyr tongue.  “Let’s see. The last time we talked was the Twosday before Caturfriday.  Since then, have you experienced any debilitating hallucinations?”

“A few, mostly during lectures.  I’ve been able to snap myself out of most of them once I realized what’s going on.  There was only one time I had to get rescued by Robin, and that was when I was sitting in the garden at home anyway.”

“And have there been any other complications?”

“With my neuroses?  No.”

“What about  _ not _ with your neuroses?”

She put her fingers to her chin.  “Nothing I can think of that’s important.  Robin still thinks I don’t know zhe’s hate-dating my eldest brother, Sprightly still thinks the nurse doesn’t know she’s drinking coffee, and every sports team still thinks I have any interest in competitive sports.”

“And you’re sure you don’t?  You aren’t simply letting your fear of the unfamiliar guide your actions?”

“Okay, on some level I guess it would be cool to be part of a team.  But I don’t think I’m really scared  _ per se, _ at least by that.  Everything’s still so new that one more unfamiliar element wouldn’t make a difference.”

“What makes everything so new?”

“Seriously?”  She turned her head to look at the psychologist; she immediately fell off the couch, then gave up on climbing back up and instead sat bow-legged on the floor in front of it.  “That’s obvious. It’s because I just… hm.” She furrowed her brow in concentration. “I guess it isn’t. That’s just a holdover response. It’s how I used to feel, when I started coming to these sessions.  But I don’t think it’s been true for a while.”

“In that case, might you still have that fear someplace within you?”

“I don’t think that’s it.  I just don’t think that competition should be the point of my abilities.  They’re not for achieving glory at the expense of others, but for living up to the name of a pro-body.  And when I can’t do that, I have the Revs.”

“Inter—”  Xe dropped xyr notebook and pencil on the desk.  “What was that last part?”

“Living up to the name of a pro-body?  Oh, have I never told you that story?” Macy sood up, cleared her throat, then gestured dramatically with one hand as if indicating that a curtain should be raised.  “Long ago — a little over two months to be precise — there dwelt in the Evil Forest a guardian by the name of Huntress Wizard.”

“Not that,” xe interjected.  “Although I would like to hear that story next.  Did you say something about the Revs?”

“What?  Oh, yeah.”  Macy sat down.  “I’ve just been helping them out here and there.  Supposably there’s gonna be some big fight, so I’m trying to insert myself into it so’s that I can de-escalate it.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very good idea for your mental health.”

“Pssh, whatever, you’re not my dad.”

“And what if I told your dad about this?”

“Well  _ he’s _ not my  _ mom.” _

Xe held xyr head in xyr hands and exhaled.  “Clearly I can’t dissuade you. Just— can you promise that you’ll take it easy?  Don’t carry the world upon your shoulders. Remember, just as you can’t know what other people are thinking, you can’t take responsibility for their actions.”

“I guess that’s the case, yeah.”  She stared into his eyes, beginning to tear up.  “But I have to try, right?”

A beat.  “If that will ease your worries, then by all means.  Now,” xe said, perusing the open page of xyr notebook, “let’s talk about something a bit more my pay grade.  Tell me about your dreams, if you can remember any.”

* * *

“It’s like a dream,” said Coalby, awed.  He wore a plain white t-shirt and jeans, his now-iconic warped sunglasses propped up on his forehead as he admired the rainbow forged from the coward’s sunset in the spray of the large fountain.  The colors seemed to dance with the breeze, putting on a show for nobody and everybody. The crowd of people milling about couldn’t see this; it only revealed itself from one particular angle. Despite being in the open, it was still perfectly hidden, simply because nobody had the perspective to realize it was there.

“I wouldn’t know,” said Ezekiel, sitting on the rim of the fountain and smelling the freshly-uprooted poinsettas, letting their fragrant aroma mix with the ashen smell where Coalby’s indelicate touch had singed their stems.  He let the corners of his oversized leather jacket dip into the water. “Don’t tend to remember mosta my dreams. Though I’ve heard good things about the process.”

Coalby nodded.  “Yes, I’d definitely… recommend… dreaming, at some point?  Wait, no, that’s stupid!” He lashed out with one hand, interrupting the arc of the droplets and disrupting the rainbow.  He recoiled his hand in pain. “That’s not what I mean at all!”

“Well then, why don’cha tell me what ya mean, then well?”  Ezekiel took the ever-present pixie stick out of his mouth, revealing it to be no more than a wooden replica, which he then pointed at Coalby as he sat up.  “Tell me about the dreams, Bee.”

“Wait, you want me to explain dreams?  Like, my dreams, or just in general, the concept of dreams?”

“Whichevah.  I like hearin’ you explain stuff to me.”

“O-oh.”  Coalby flame grew brighter, causing the sleeves of his t-shirt to char.  “Well, I’m not sure if I feel comfortable divulging my deepest subconscious fears on our first date, so I’ll just stick to the big picture.  Dreams are sort of… hm.” He crossed his arms and tapped his foot. “I’m not sure I know as much as I think I do, come to think of it. They’re like stories our brains write for us, to try to make sense of our memories?  I’m pretty sure that’s what I overheard Macy say one time.”

Ezekiel arched an eyebrow.  “You know Macadamia?”

“Vaguely.  She’s friends with my — er, my friend who’s on the academic team has a friend who sits in math class next to a member of her welcoming committee.  I just figured that since she claims to be some kind of hero she has better odds than most when it comes to knowing what she’s talking about.”

“Pr’aps.  I guess my brain just doesn’t have a lot to think about ‘cause my life’s so boring.”

“Come off, Zeke, that’s ridiculous!”  The blackening of Coalby’s sleeves started to accelerate.  “You’re so cool and collected and never get nervous hots and probably rarely need to replace your entire wardrobe because you got stage fright at your third grade dance recital.”

“I guess all that’s literally true, but — here, lemme put it this way.”  Ezekiel twirled the fake pixie stick between his fingers like a drummer, his face adopting an expression that looked suspiciously like it wasn’t a smirk.  “Ya know why I always have this stupid thing in my mouth?”

Coalby shrugged.  “Oral fixation?”

“Nah, it’s ‘cuzza my bro.  He’s the cool one. He defines what ‘cool’  _ is, _ fer me.  So I gotta be more like him if’n I wanna be respected.  Least that’s what I thought.” He slouched, letting out a raspy breath.  “Now all people see when they look at me’s a shade of my bro. S’not what I wanted, but real candid?  It’s the only outcome there coulda been.”

“Listen.”  Coalby got down on one knee, willing himself to be cool enough to put a hand on his boyfriend’s jacket without destroying it.  “You’re your own person, okay? You have all the time in the world to figure out who that person is. And now that I’m here, I can help you along the way.”

“Sounds nice.”  Ezekiel handed Coalby the fake pixie stick, which immediately turned to ash in the flameling’s fingers.  “I guess the real reason you do so well in lit isn’t ‘cause yer a fire elemental, but ‘cause you’ve got the soul f’a poet.”

Coalby blushed furiously, pulling his hand away from Ezekiel just as smoke started rising from his arms.  “I’m not — you think — I—” He squeezed the side of his head and forced himself to breathe the cool evening air.  “Speaking of suddenly changing the subject, how do  _ you _ know Macy?”

“That?  Oh, she’s in the gang now.”  Ezekiel’s eyes darted from side; then he stood up and spoke quietly in what passed for Coalby’s ear.  “Big things’re brewin’. Lotta restless legs.”

“I know,” Coalby whispered back.  “Best I can gather, something must have gone down at the Caturfriday Dance, and now a conflict is inevitable.”  A beat.  “Do you think—”

“—it’s us?  Nah. Least, I hope not.  I was sorta hoping this whole thing’d blow over, but if yer seein’ it too, that ain’t happenin’.”

“Math.  Just to be safe, we should try to be more inconspicuous.”

“Nah.”

“You’re right, if they’re going to show us the thornbush, that’s their problem.”  Coalby stepped backwards so he could show Ezekiel the determination in his eyes. “We’re going to rub our love in their faces, and there’s nothing they can do about it!”

* * *

_ “Ay, cucaracha! _   I’m going to do something about that, alright.”  Astrida was pacing around Coalby and his ice-elemental buddy Jasleet, the rest of the gang watching from the sidelines.  As she spoke, her exaggerated hand movements caused her loose-fitting purple robes to flutter about in a dancing arc, capturing in its folds the whirling energy of her unearned rage.  “Fraternizing with those useless  _ pintamonas _ and then announcing it like some brave act of defiance.  What thoughts were running through that fiery  _ calabaza _ of yours, I wonder?”

Coalby felt himself wanting to shrink back; he pressed himself up against Jasleet, as if to prevent Astrida from suddenly occupying the space between them.  Jasleet, on the other tactile smoke tendril, was firm and unwavering, which Coalby figured was easy to do when one was made of solid crystals.  _ “Oy, _ calm your down,” Jasleet said, his voice cool and collected.  “If I ain’t mistaken, the romantic inclinations of my buddy here qualify as precisely ‘none of your beeswax’, so maybe don’t get too hyped over something that you neither have any control over nor should, um, pretend I phrased that better but you get the point.”  Coalby nodded in agreement, slightly, when he thought Astrida wasn’t looking.

In a blink Astrida was in front of Coalby, an accusatory finger pointed at his face.  “I’ll tell you what my beeswax is, flameling,” she hissed. “My beeswax is the security of this  _ familia. _   If you’re having some manner of covert affair with a Rev, then you’re putting yourself in a position where your loyalties cannot be trusted.”

At a nudge from Jasleet, Coalby took a step forward.  Astrida, startled, took a step back in response. “Listen, Trid,” he said, “I don’t know what you think I’m going to do to betray us, but I assure you I’m still one hundred percent loyal.  I know what  _ familia _ means, and however valid my feelings are for Zeke — and they are very much valid — I won’t soon forget all that it has done for me.  I wouldn’t be here right now, on this chalk-scored blacktop, were it not for the Rads, same as any of you. I would never do anything to endanger that, and—”

Here he had to pause to compose himself.  He closed his eyes for a brief moment, wondering if he should really say this next part.  He could very easily imagine how it could be misinterpreted.  _ It’s not like that would make them think less of me, at this point. _   “—and frankly,” he continued, “I’m insulted that you would insinuate otherwise.”

“Well, what else am I supposed to incinerate?” asked Astrida, a grimace on her face.   _ “Apenas una quincena después del baile de gatuévado, _ where we finally find concrete evidence of aggressive Rev recruitment efforts thanks to Claire, and you turn out to be in the arms of their leader’s younger brother?  Surely you must admit that the timing is  _ sospechoso.” _

Coalby opened his mouth to respond, but he had been unprepared to deal with an actual reasoned argument.  He closed his mouth, then opened it, repeating this process a few more times, before finally settling on, “Okay, I concede that you do have something resembling a point.”

“Yeah,” Jasleet added, “but I bet you could smooth it out if you coiffed it differently, heyo!”  He gave Coalby a quick, practiced high-five that stung both of their palms with the pain of comedy.

“But in that vein,” the flameling continued, “what exactly do you think I would even do if I had such green-knightly inclinations?”

Astrida crossed her arms, annoyed at the attempted gotcha.  “You could leak our  _ postre _ -smuggling connections, for one thing.”

“Or sabotage our poster-painting service for the upcoming student council election,” suggested Claire, munching on a bowl of popcorn she had somehow procured.

“Or turn a blind eye toward people playing the four-square variant where you can’t hit the ball after it’s touched your body and then hit your square without having hit your square before the first time you touched it,” added a sentient baseball mitt who was also there and had been the whole time.

“And even if you don’t think you’re going to do any of those terrible things,” Astrida continued, resuming her dramatic encircling of the two elementals, “that is not to say you would not do so in the future.  Romantic relationships tend to cause people to adjust their priorities.”

Coalby shifted uncomfortably, suddenly feeling hot under the collar.  “What are you gesturing at?”

“You say your loyalties haven’t shifted?  Fine. Let us say that I believe you. In that case, the only reasonable course of action is to ensure that the oncoming storm breaks before that changes.”  She made a violent sweeping gesture with her hand, and with impeccable timing a breeze billowed her robe behind her like a cape. “Tell your boyfriend that in a week’s time, our two groups will meet on this battleground to decide who the true champions of the schoolyard are,  _ comprendas?” _

Coalby gulped.  “Yes’m.”  _ Well, that could have gone better. _

* * *

“That could have gone better,” said Macy, sitting cross-legged on an unbalanced chair in the dimly-lit half-empty auditorium as an embarrassed Penny rushed offstage.  “I mean, I guess it’s not that big a deal during auditions, but completely breaking character in the middle of a soliloquy isn’t great.”

“And yet,” sighed Mx. Coyfield, sitting a row away and scribbling on a checklist of names attached to a clipboard.  “And yet,” xe repeated, “that’s still by far the best audition I’ve seen all day. I suppose that’s what I get for scheduling this on a Oneday.”  A beat. “Also, don’t be mean to your… sister? Cousin?  _ Mishpocheh.” _

“What?”  Macy scratched at her ear slit.  “Oh, uh, niece. And, uh, noted.”

“By the way,” said Mx. Coyfield, turning around to face Macy, “you should consider joining the school play.  You’ve certainly got a flair for the dramatic, and when you were telling your classmates that story about dismantling a squirrel empire in the Valley of Moths, they were enraptured.”

“That’s a true story, by the way.”  Macy reached into her pocket and took out her phone, which had been buzzing all night.  “Well, mostly true. I could tell it to you sometime.” She squinted, barely able to make out the text onscreen thanks to the spotty lighting.  “Dang, my dad texted that he wants us to have an early dinner. I’m gonna need to skip over to Penny and skedaddle.”

“So, will you think about joining the play?” xe asked as Macy stood up, slinging her backpack over her shoulder.  “We really need — that is to say, we could really use someone like you.”

“You mean someone halfway decent?”

“No, you just have a knack for stylized narration that would be perfect for a stage version of a folk tale as old as this.”

Macy shrugged.  “Sure, why not?”

“Excell—”

“Oh wait,” she said, stomping and snapping in performative disappointment.  “I just remembered why not. It’s because as soon as I step onstage in front of an audience I’ll start hallucinating so hard Robin’ll have to pilot my body from the inside like an enormous hand puppet.”

“Fair.  Thanks anyway.”

“I’m not sure why you’re thanking me, but you’re welcome I guess.”  Macy walked across the front of the auditorium on a direct path toward the backstage access hatch.  She could probably get to Penny faster if she vaulted directly onto the stage, but if she started showing off she might not leave on time, and besides, she’d been sitting still for far too long and would probably bang her shin on the ledge or something slapstick like that.

She was nearly to the inexplicably concealed door when she heard someone else call her name.  “Yes?” she asked, whirling around on one foot. The recently-washed, squeaky auditorium floor was too slippery for her to stop, so she just leaned into the motion and completed another rotation before leaping gracefully out of the loop and landing in a curtsy.   _ So much for not showing off. _

“Hi, yes,” said the fox-like student before her, who seemed to be made half of wood.  “My name’s Bran Don. I’ve been trying to track you down because I think you’re pretty neat and also I would…”  He looked down at his barky palm. “Ah yes. Because I would like to invite you to the archery club on behalf of the archery club, who wishes you to join the archery club.”

Macy rolled her eyes.  “I’ve said it a thousand times to a thousand people, I’m not interested in competitive sports.  That’s not my scene.”  _ Also, I guess Sprightly was wrong about there not being an archery club. _

“No, our club isn’t competitive.  I’m far too asocial to reach out to any archery leagues.  Mostly we just shoot around, talking with each other in a relaxed yet fun environment while also attempting to hit targets for no purpose other than bragging rights.”

“I do like bragging,” Macy mused.  “Alright, I’ll do it.”

“Okay, cool, so, our next meeting is—”

“Don’t bother,” said Macy as she backed up and opened the backstage door without looking.  “I have a knack for meeting up with extracurricular clubs despite not knowing when or where.  It’s one of my superpowers.”

“Cool!”

“I’m just kidding, I remember seeing flyers.”  She opened up the door and slipped in, poking her head out to say, “See you then.”

Bran Don whistled as the door slammed shut.  “Now there goes a girl who knows how to get through an entire social interaction without needing to read pre-written cues off her bizarre tree-hand.”  A beat. “And who also doesn’t have a bizarre tree-hand.”

* * *

A walnut stood in the camouflaged doorway, wearing a carefully-stained smock, observing the other students milling about in the cafeteria.  The pre-school crowd was usually bigger on Slimedays, since not as many clubs were meeting then as on other days, and today was no exception; even a half hour before school, the place was packed.  They figured today might have been an exception, since it was the first of the month and that sometimes meant people had things going on, but apparently the calendar was new enough that this axiom did not apply.  They didn’t recall what the month’s name was, and they refused to. They had decided at the start of the year to despise this calendar, and France was not a fickle walnut. (Incidentally, the month was called Lenoir.)

“Yo,” said a voice from behind them.  “That her?”

“You’d know if it was, Jordathan.”  They kept their eyes on the crowd. “You’ve done this drop almost a quarter as many times as I have.”

“I’m not Jordathan,” said Ezekiel.

“Sorry.  Wait, is  _ who _ her?”

“That wheat stalk who’s bean leaning against the wall right next to the door for like five minutes now.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course it’s not.”  To humor the kid, they peeked around the edge of the door.  “What are you talking about, there’s no one even there.”

“Yo,” said a voice from behind them.  “I w-was on the  _ other _ wall n-next to the door.”

They turned around again.  It was her, Sprightly. “Y-you got the s-stuff?” she asked.

“Sure do.”  France pulled a large cup of hot coffee out of a small coat pocket and handed it to the nervous undergrassman.  “You really shouldn’t be drinking this much coffee,” they observed. “You never stuttered on sibilants before.”

“You gonna cut me o-off?”

“Don’t be bizarre.  It’s your mistake to make.  Just some complimentary advice, is all.”

She took the coffee and raised it to her lips, before pausing to say, “W-well, thanks for the advice, but I-I don’t need your a-advice.”  Then she walked away, mumbling to herself about how dumb that line was and how glad she was that it wasn’t recorded in permanent form anywhere.

“Whoa,” said Ezekiel, stepping up next to France.  “I can’t believe you was gonna tell ‘er to quit yer product.  Didn’t figger you fer such a generous person.”

France shrugged.  “I can’t be too generous if I sold it to her anyway.”

“Yeah, I s’pose so.”  He tapped them on the shoulder.  “Ey, what time is it?”

They held up their wrist and looked at the watch hands.  “Time for me to go to the bathroom.” They stepped inside the backstage area and closed the camouflaged door, leaving Ezekiel standing alone at the edge of the cafetorium.

Suddenly there was a loud yelp.  Ezekiel looked up to see Sprightly shaking her coffee angrily at another student who was scrambling to pick up their books off the floor.  “Hey, I’m w-walking here!” said Sprightly. “Watch where y-you’re going!”

“Sorry, Sprightly,” said the other student, their voice muffled by the several layers of scarves over their face.  “I guess all these layers got in the way.”

“N-no, I’m s-sorry.”  The wheat stalk spontaneously adopted a much feebler posture.  “I a-also should have w-watched myself. Do you w-want me to help y-you pick up your books?”

“Nah, I’m good.”

“S-say, why are you w-wearing so many l-layers anyway?  It’s s-summer, aren’t you h-hot?”

“That’s my secret; I’m always hot.”

“Y-yeah you are.”  A beat.  “Anyway, see you at tutoring.”

“See ya.”  They finished stuffing their backpack, slung it over their shoulder, and then saw Ezekiel, at which point they jumped in the air and dropped their backpack all over again.  They pulled down some of the scarves on their face, revealing themself to be Coalby and their eyes to be wide with startlement. “Heya, Zeke,” he said, laughing nervously. “Funny running into you here.  You know Sprightly? I guess it really is a small world.”

“Smaller school.”  He walked over and gave the flameling a smooch.  “I guess she’s another wunna yer tutorees.”

“Actually, she’s tutoring me.”

“If ya don’t mind my askin’, what ‘xactly is she tutorin’ ya fer?”

“Oh.”  Coalby burned brighter, and smoke began emanating from inside the bundles of cloth surrounding him.  “That would be literature.”

A second passed by while Ezekiel processed this information.  “Ya sure?”

Coalby got even brighter.  “Sure I’m sure, for sure. That is to say, yes indeed.”

“That’s funny, ‘cuz I could have sworn  _ you _ were  _ my _ literature tutor.”

Coalby was now bright enough that Ezekiel had to squint.  “Yes, that is also correct.”

“Ya know, I really have to admit, that makes me kinda super—”

“I know!”  Coalby’s ensemble erupted in a violent fireball, belching smoke.  Then entire cafetorium turned to look, gasping in shock. He was now two meters tall, a veritable giant of ragged swirling fire, wearing nothing but a light blue tank top with a snowflake pattern and a guilty but resigned expression.  He let the scene hang for a moment, unable to muster the words to speak. He felt naked, and not just because he was.

“I know,” he repeated, slumping back down to his normal size.  “I’m a  _ pintamonas, _ and I deserve your anger.  I really do have a passion for literature, but not the right parts.  The theory part, the culture surrounding it, I can never keep it straight.  I’ve been going to tutoring for a while, and then I met you. Do you remember how we met?”

Ezekiel raised his finger to—

“It was after one of the tutoring sessions,” Coalby continued.  “You had just picked a fight with Jasleet, and I stepped in to calm him down.  Hehe, in retrospect I guess there were signs all along that we were from opposing sides.  But yeah, after that Jasleet went away to skulk, and you and I started talking. You told me about how you thought it was important to own your aesthetic, although you didn’t use those exact words, and the way you said it made it sound like a grand mission statement.  I guess right from moment one I fell in love with you.”

Ezekiel cleared his throat and—

“After that,” Coalby continued continuing, “you mentioned that you were looking for a literature tutor, and having recently come into an ability to understand the course thanks to my own tutor, I offered to do it for you.  It didn’t seem like a big deal in the moment, and after that it would have been too awkward for me to tell you that I was really just…” He hung his head. “A fraud.”

Ezekiel put a hand on Coalby’s shoulder with a sizzle of nut carapace.  “Hey,” he said. “I was gonna say I’m kinda super impressed? With the honesty it takes to reckonize yer limitation in a subject yer passionate ‘bout an’ conference with other people so’s to share yer knowledge.”

Coalby blushed.  He put a hand on Ezekiel’s as if to remove it, but he didn’t actually move it.  “Oh. Then I guess I’ve been freaking out over nothing, huh?”

“Nah, I get it.  Just believe me when I say that yer not a fraud.”  He suddenly pulled Coalby into a tight embrace. “Yer someone I deeply admire,” he said quietly but firmly, directly into what passed for an ear, “and that’s why I chose to date ya.  Nothin’ can change that.”

“Our gangs are gonna have a massive fight in two days,” he whispered back.

“Oh Glob dammit.”

* * *

A stiff mountain breeze perturbed the overcast summer afternoon, refusing to play along with the season.  It picked up dust from the sun-warmed blacktop, rattled the surrounding chain-link fence, and caused everyone’s clothes to flap about dramatically.  The elongated mountain shadows, silhouettes of the immobile mountains formed by the setting of a cowardly sun, painted the playground in stark shades, drawing arbitrary lines among the assembled crowd as if selecting teams for some vast game of cosmic dodgeball.

At a hand signal from someone in the middle, the crowds parted, leaving five figures standing in four chalk-marked squares facing each other.  Jordathan the pinto bean and France the walnut occupied two adjacent squares; they were decked in identical black leather riding jackets and goggles, and their stances, wide and squat with buckled arms, perfectly mirrored each other.  Opposite them stood the much less coordinated duo of Astrida the marshmallow and Jasleet the ice elemental. The former was rigid and decked in a simple, serviceable green jumpsuit; the latter wore a fashionable red blazer. The former was tense, ready to move at any moment; the latter was slouched, as if present by mere obligation.

In the middle stood Macadamia Jugland in her most sentimentally-valuable blue-grey hoodie, her right hand grasping a red flare gun behind her back, her left outstretched and holding a green foam ball larger than a head of cabbage but smaller than a really big head of cabbage.  “Ladies, gentleenbies, and the rest,” she announced, eyes closed, projecting her voice as if through a loudspeaker, “we are gathered here today to settle a score two dozen harrowing months in the making. What happens here will determine the fate of this playground for academic years to come.  Do we all understand?”

“Yep,” said Jordathan, swallowing butterflies.

_ “Sí,” _ said Astrida, glaring at a nervous Ezekiel hiding amongst the wildflowers at the edge of the blacktop.

“Y’all know the rules,” Macy continued,  “as do I, so I don’t want to see any confusion out there about what is and isn’t acceptable.”

“Wait, wait, wait.”  France broke their stance to skilt at Macy.   _ “Do _ we know the rules?  I thought that was the whole point.”

“Abe’s red Mars,” Macy muttered, “do I have to explain everything to you people?  I meant the  _ real _ rules.”

A beat.  “…anything goes?”

“Anything goes.”  Macy threw the ball high into the sky, then leapt backwards out of the four-square court and fired a loud blank into the air.  “Begin!”

Astrida moved to make the first strike, but Jordathan was faster.  With a sudden hammer kick, he launched the ball downwards into the far corner of Jasleet’s square, bouncing right on the edge with a loud thwack.

The ice elemental stretched out a wintry tendril, knocking the ball back into the court and sending is sailing straight toward Jordathan’s square.  When the pinto bean tried to set the ball into the air, a sheen of ice formed over his arms, and the ball collapsed onto the ground. Smirking, Jasleet walked up and pushed him out of his square.

Truffle, in a much better fitting version of eir typical trenchcoat, rushed up to replace eir leader in the lowest-position square, clotheslining Jasleet on his way in.  “Velcome to the playground, vinterkind,” e said.

Then with a loud smack Astrida hurled the ball into the center of Truffle’s square, and e walked out unceremoniously.  France, however, was not as gracious. “You spiteful, surreptitious snake!” she spat. “Have you thieves no honor?”

“Bold of you to call us thieves,” responded Astrida, catching the ball as Claire tossed it back to her from the sidelines.  “Besides, you heard your  _ peón. _   Anything goes.”

Suddenly France’s demeanor shifted.  They were calmer, a smirk written on their face; they stood straighter, their arms bouncing slightly.  “Well, since you’ve brought that up, I guess I should meet you on your own terms.”

_ “Espera, _ what in Ooo do you—”

With the speed and precision of a viper, France reached out, grabbed the ball from Astrida, and in one smooth motion pelted her in the face so hard she was knocked clear out of the court.

A beat.

“Every kid for themself!” shouted Jasleet, fists raised in the air but still lying on the ground.

What followed was a good, honest, old-fashioned highway hootenanny, which is definitely a real phrase.  Fists were flying. Balls, foam bats, frisbees, and pogs were used as weapons. Kids were flying. In short, it was nothing short of recess, except with higher stakes.  Despite the excitable niflvætr’s proclamation, the fight was fairly well organized, with the two lines of gang members squaring off on a diagonal of the four-square grid, give or take some push and pull.  The rhythmic movements of untrained instinct formed a percussive, dancelike pattern, weaving order and harmony from discord and violence. If there were some witness who could record and recount this, perhaps it could even seem beautiful, and to a twenty-first century viewer, oddly familiar.

On the granular level, no such beauty existed.  There was only adrenaline and dirt. A macadamia who was  _ not _ named after the species of nut they were wrestled with a sentient baseball mitt, pinning zhir to the ground.  Claire the squirrel punched France the walnut, then held her hand in pain. Jasleet whipped up a small flurry and pelted Jordathan with his namesake precipitation.  Ezekiel stayed in the flowers.

Coalby looked around at the chaos before him, horrified that he may have been partly responsible.  If he had been less reckless, more reckful, could he have prevented this? Or, as was more likely, was this inevitable, and had he instead merely accelerated it?  If the latter, was that a bad thing? And in any case, was he not obliged to participate? His moirail was. He meant buddy. Forget he said moirail.  _ You know what?  Jessie has had my back so many times; I should have his. _   Coalby gritted what passed for teeth and lobbed a small fireball into the enemy line.

Macy looked up, ignoring her previous opponent (who, offended, went to look for a different part of the battle to join).  A black mark was scorched across her shirt. She stomped over to Coalby, easily dodging the intervening fighters. “That was my most sentimental hoodie,” she said.

“I’m— I’m—” Coalby stammered.  “Wait, you know what? I’m  _ not _ sorry, because for some reason… because for some reason!”

Macy spun around on one foot and roundhouse kicked Coalby to the ground.  She loomed over him, a death glower on her face. “This is for Masse!” she shouted, raising a fist and preparing to strike as Coalby winced.

A beat.  “I said,” Macy repeated, annoyed,  _ “this is for Masse!” _

Not quite suddenly enough, Ezekiel ran over from across the playground, taking the long way to avoid charging through the fight.  “Noooooooo,” he shouted, though he needed to stop for breath a few times. Eventually he reached the two of them, diving with his arms outstretched and landing right next to Coalby.  He tapped the flame elemental, who rolled out of the way.

Macy gently lowered her hand down onto Ezekiel, and the pinto bean screamed in pain.  Macy immediately recoiled in horror. “Alas!” she shouted, drawing the attention of everyone on the battlefield.  “See what tragedy this day has wrought! In turning lover against lover, we are doing naught but harming ourselves.  If this is the price of our rivalry, then lo, it is a price far too great.”

“Ah jeez,” said Jordathan, releasing Astrida from a noogie headlock.  “This’s terrible.”

_ “Estoy de acuerdo,” _ agreed Astrida, letting go of Jordathan’s wedgie.  “It is truly us, and not these two, who have lost perspective.”

“No, I ain’t talkin’ ‘bout that.  Well, a li’l that,” Jordathan conceded.  “I guess maybe this whole feud was blown a twibble outta proportion.  But mainly I meant y’alls’ actin’. Terrible!”

“I wasn’t going to say anything, but yes,” Astrida agreed.  “Probably the worst I’ve seen in a long time. I’ll tell you what, we’ll agree to alternate weeks for four-square rules on the condition that none of you act in our presence again for the next year.”

Jordathan nodded.  “I’ll even concede that the Rads can have next week,” he added.  “An’ I’ll apologize fer makin’ life difficult fer y’all. Rest assured, you lovers’ve got yer revenge.”

“Wait, that weren’t s’posed ta be revenge,” Ezekiel whispered in Macy’s ear slit.  “When I pulled ya aside, didja plan that angle s’well?”

“No,” Macy whispered back, “but just play along.”

“I know we do not deserve it,” Astrida said, wringing her hands, “but will the two of you find it in your hearts to forgive us?”

“Absolutely not!” exclaimed Jasleet, sitting on top of a frozen Truffle.  “After what you’ve—”

“Yes,” Coalby interrupted as he stood, “as long as you’re serious about this being the end of the mistrust.”

“I am.”

“Good.  In that case,” he said, turning to help Ezekiel up, “let’s go have a non-terrible date.”

* * *

Macy, Penny, and a few other students were seated in the poorly-lit cafetorium, watching as the last of the auditioners finished their performance to the tired applause of Mx. Coyfield.  Outwardly, xe exclaimed, “Very good, Danube.” Inwardly, xe groaned.

It wasn’t a lack of talent that xe was worried about; if that had concerned xem, xe wouldn’t have been attempting to direct a school play.  No, xe didn’t have anyone with the right energy to play the lead roles. Even if Macy had taken xem up on xyr offer, the marquess would be well-suited for a narrator’s role, but not for one of the leads.  She would dominate the stage and steal it from whoever she was acting against. Everyone else was good enough for a middle schooler, but since the previous class had graduated there were only a few experienced, and none of them had the stamina or stage presence to even be comfortable in either of the aggressive central roles this time around.

“Whatcha thinking, ‘Rector?” one of those experienced students asked in a cheerful lilt.  Flora Foss, or ‘Slick’ as the other students called her, exuded a dreamlike aura at all times, as if simply being around her were making one question their own lucidity.  She moved and talked like she wasn’t convinced she was real, as if she saw her whole life as one extended stage performance. Mx. Coyfield was convinced that when she acted, she wasn’t adopting a new character but adapting her own.  If xe had to pick someone to act opposite Macy, it would be her, but xe feared the combination of her surreal melodrama and Macy’s nonchalant grandiosity would not cancel each other out but react violently in some kind of thespian vinegar-and-baking-soda volcano.  Although that would certainly be entertaining, xe didn’t want to deal once again with the aftermath of mass acting-induced existential crises.

“I don’t know,” xe answered truthfully.  “I haven’t made a decision yet, of course.  You’ll almost certainly be in it, but I’ll let you know what part you’ve got… let’s say this Saturfriday.”

“Well, isn’t that exciting!” Slick sang.  She bopped Mx. Coyfield on the nose with one of her sunflower leaves and pirouetted away, followed by a small patch of admirers.  As she moved, the air itself vibrated, as if harmonizing along with the music in her head with the tinkling ivory of the piano at the back of the stage—

“—Excuse me!” Mx. Coyfield shouted.  “What are you doing on that piano?”

Robin the rainicorn-dog shrugged.  “I dunno, I don’t have anything better to do.”

“Well, it sounds pretty good.  Would you mind helping us out in the production with incidental music?”

“Sure, I don’t have anything better to do.”

“Great.”  As she stood up, the grating of the chair on the linoleum floor resounding through the large, sparsely-furnished room.  She ringed, waiting a few seconds for the echoes to fade, before continuing. “Well, aside from that, I do believe that’s all for today.  Final casting decisions should be made by the end of the week. Those of you whom I don’t have for class, I’ll send someone to hunt you down at lunch.  Everyone else, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Just then, the outside doors slammed open, punctuated by a staccato G♭ᴍ7→G+→D♭m/A♭ cadence from Robin played at what might have been 160bpm eighth notes in the piano’s fifth octave at a volume of 80 decibels.

“Yo, hold the presses!” yelled Jordathan as he ran hastily through the doorway, followed close behind by Astrida.

“Is this the place?” asked the marshmallow.

“This is  _ a _ place,” replied Danube as he emerged from the backstage door.

“We heard y’all was puttin’ on a search fer peeps fer the bird play,” Jordathan rasped, his voice clearly destroyed.  “Wanted in.”

“I wanted in,” Astrida clarified.  “This  _ calabaza _ just wanted to avoid getting literally upstaged.”

“You wish.  I’m here so’s that you don’t drag this production down.  ‘S one’a my bro’s fav’rite folk tales, ya know, which means it’s mine too”

_ “Tu hermano? _   I hope you don’t share your acting talent like you do your interests.”

“Why, I oughta—”

“Wait!”  At the sound of that shrill screech from Mx. Coyfield, with the timbre of an aggravated whistle, the whole room stopped and stared at xem.  The roughhousing interlopers even paused, frozen in postures of ready attack, blinking in confusion. The silence in the air, punctuated by fading echoes and resonant vibrations from the piano Robin dared not touch, gradually transmuted from shock to foreboding.  If Slick had radiated surrealism, then in this moment, Mx. Coyfield must have radiated the pent-up frustration from the previous week’s foibles. Even the least perceptive in the room (Robin) could tell xe was ready to burst.

Xe stuck out a hand, gave a thumbs-up and winked.  “You’ve got the parts!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure that's the best criteria for casting roles in a play, but then again what do I know about casting?
> 
> Like I mentioned, this chapter was freaking weird. Very little Macy, no Robin at all outside of one paragraph of narration, and the main characters are two degrees of separation from any character we've met before. I knew it was a risk going in. It's not like I invented that idea, though, and it does serve a purpose (although I'm not about to say what that purpose is; it's not my place as an author to say how my story works, only what I was thinking as I wrote it).
> 
> So what was I thinking? “Aw geez, I need to establish Macy's dynamic at school but I don't want to nor think I would be capable of writing a new-kid-at-school plot, and it also needs to cover a large span of time so we can catch up to the point on the timeline where I've established Macy's birthday to occur.” Somehow, I ended up at, “I know! Let's make an extremely loose derivative of West Side Story that has almost no elements in common beyond vague structural things!” I regret nothing.
> 
> I'm not sure I'll ever go into more detail about the actual content of the fictitious folktale that's at the center of this episode, at least not for a while. I have some vague ideas but nothing concrete. Plus it's supposed to be told inconsistently (like real folktales), so giving a definitive version would feel wrong. If I ever do give one, however, don't be surprised if it doesn't quite line up with what's here — this chapter reflects a very much incomplete understanding, both on my end and the characters', of that story, and a more complete understanding might make me want to go in a different direction. What's important is that it's a mythologized rivalry archetype, or at least that it's seen as one. And yes, if it wasn't clear, it's the basis of the play that's being cast.
> 
> I don't really have all that much to say about this chapter, so here's the preview:  
> “‘Right,’ said Marceline, in a tone that implied, _Wrong.”_


	13. Marceline Bubblegum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Pen is chosen as a diplomatic envoy to the Ice Kingdom, Macy and Robin tag along to keep his daughter company, where Macy meets a certain vampiric musician.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy we gettin into it now folks! Finally, we've got a chapter focusing on one of the most popular characters from Adventure Time, a character who has probably had an incalculable impact on pop culture, and one of the biggest stepping stones in Rebecca Sugar's rise to becoming the Sucrose Demon she is today. I've been looking forward to this for a while.
> 
> So yeah, that's basically all the lead-in I'm going to give for this chapter. There's some other stuff going on but who cares about that?
> 
> On an unrelated note, my mutual alpha reader is working on another Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell fanfic, so for those of you in the extremely small cross-section of the AT and JS&MN fandoms, keep your eye on the author's notes for further updates.

Penhaligon Arthur Jugland sat on a cold, damp wooden bench next to his father, soaking in the cool, crisp night air as he listened to the subtle harmonies of birdsong and wind chime.  With enough imagination, he could connect the seemingly random notes into a fluid order, which despite never repeating itself had a unified familiarity to it. The push and pull of the pitches, mirroring the confused mountain breeze, sang a song of imminent birth, as if to anticipate the arrival of the huckleberry bloom.  Folded in his hands was his birdwatching notebook, in which he had given up attempting to sketch once natural light had failed him. Now, he mostly kept it out because he had grown used to the sensation of the book closing around his thumb. He wondered if he were giving the book some futile hope that he might retrieve his page and resume drawing.  If so, was that cruel or kind?

“You’re getting existential again,” said the Duke, putting his hand on Pen’s shoulder.  “Is everything alright?”

“Hm.”  Pen decided to ignore his father’s question, instead asking, “how can you tell?”

“You always slouch when you’re existential.  Or when you’re depressed, but in that case you’d probably be sighing a lot more.”

Pen sighed.  “You’re right, Dad.  I just been thinking.”

“Yes, I’d imagine that does tend to precede existentialism.”

Pen shot his father a quizzical look he knew the man wouldn’t be able to see.  “Robin’s really rubbing off on you that much, huh?”

“Well, a good part of it is definitely your influence as well.”

The peanut smiled, shaking his head.  “I guess I set myself up for that one with basically my entire life.”

“Good, because I think that was all the thorns I can manage and now I’m starting to feel bad.”

Pen lifted the Duke’s hand off his shoulder so he (Pen) could put his (Pen’s) hand on the Duke’s (his).  “Don’t feel bad on my account. Frankly, I’m proud of you. It shows real, meaningful determination that you were able to muster that up at all.”

“I’m not going to secede from the Candy Kingdom.”

“Dreck.  I suppose I can live with that; it’s not as bad as knowing that it was Robin of all people who finally started chipping through your shell.”

“Oh, right.”  The Duke inhaled with a sharp whine, like some manner of reverse tea-kettle ready to dispense a beverage which would bring nobody no calm, no how.  “You… really hate zhir, don’t you?”

“Not in that way.  At least, I don’t think so.  Zhe…” Pen trailed off, composing his next sentence in his head.  This was not a sentiment he wanted to mangle. “Zhe certainly hates  _ me _ that way, but I don’t want to give zhir the wrong signal, right?  But this whole situation is really awkward already. I talked to Colla, and she seemed fine with it.”  His voice started growing in intensity as his thoughts began to outpace his conscious mind. “I kinda wish she weren’t because that would make this a whole lot easier.  Instead, I’m stuck in this emotional limbo where even I’m not sure what I want, and the whole situation — the whole situation—”

“—jingles your bells?” suggested his father?

Pen nodded.  “Like clockwork.”

“I don’t think the story of the Magpie and the Mountain Jay was meant to be pitch romantic advice.”  Nearby, a pair of corvids tweeted their assent.

“Nobody knows the true meaning of the myth,” Pen recited in a projecting, authoritative voice, “because its origins have been obscured in contradictory origins, so any extrapolation that concords with the majority of extant pre-incorporation manuscripts could be considered equally valid.”

The Duke laughed.  “I see you remember Macy’s essay on the subject.”

“Remember?  I helped proofread it!”

“Speaking of education, the deal with the Ice King finally went through.  Hopefully that’ll be good news for the mines.”

“I doubt it,” scoffed Pen.  “This is a power move. I guarantee that contract will have buried conditionals so draconian it’ll make Princess Bubblegum look like actual bubblegum.”  He twiddled with his long black toupee. “Wait, can I redo that analogy so it makes sense?”

“If you think you’re un-tired enough to come up with a better one, go for it.”

“On second thought, never mind.”

“Anyway, if you’re worried that the terms will be too draconian, then maybe you could look them over as a dignitary.”

“What, you’re sending me off to the Ice Kingdom to to negotiate your own deal?”

“If you’re worried about my potentially getting fleeced, it makes sense.”

“You know what?  Sure, I’ll do it.  In fact, I’ll go  _ instead _ of you, just so you don’t have any chance at all of fleecing yourself.  I’ve been meaning to get out of town with Colla for a while, and hopefully the change of scenery will help me clear my head.”  He turned to flash his father an unseeable smile. “I can even bring Macy along, to keep little Penny company.”

“And Robin.”

Pen’s smile faltered.  “What.”

“And Robin.  I guarantee Macy won’t leave town without zhir.  Honestly, it’s adorable.”

“Yes, adorable.  That’s definitely what it is.”

“…you know, Pen, you don’t have to bring zhir along if it makes you uncomfortable.”

“No, no, I should.  I’ll just have to live with it.  Maybe I’ll find out how that rancorous rainicorn-dog sleeps at night.”

* * *

Robin hadn’t slept that night.  Zhe had spent the entire time helping Macy cope with bad dreams.  Despite just shy of a month having passed since the blacktop brawl, the poor nut had still been wracked with guilt over how she could have handled it better.  This had reignited her litany of other nightmares, resulting in some very bizarre dream scenarios such as Bandit Princess attending Macy’s school. That image might give  _ Robin _ nightmares.  The rainicorn-dog had gone so far as talking to Dr. Upe about it, but the two concluded that there wasn’t much either of them could do at the moment to help Macy’s growing guilt complex.

That didn’t mean it felt acceptable not to try.  “You know you handled that well,” Robin insisted once again as Macy buffed herself with her iron wool sheet.  “That could have turned out much worse, and thanks to you, it didn’t.”

“It was a sitcom solution,” she replied.  “Yeah, it worked, but that’s because we got lucky.  I should have been more forceful, but… I didn’t want to lose the respect of the Revs by disrupting their status quo, and I didn’t want to upset the Rads any more than my existence already did.”  She spun around to look at Robin, and for the first time in the sterile light of the bathroom zhe noticed the bags under her eyes, bags to match zhir own. “Cowardly, right?”

“Selfish, maybe, but I think you’re allowed some selfishness.  Reward yourself for your heroism.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“Then how  _ does _ it work?”

Macy skilted, then spun around and went back to buffing.  “Let me know if someone ever actually figures that out, okay?”

By the time the two went downstairs for a delicious breakfast of fancy oatmeal (it’s like oatmeal but fancy), Macy had either been pulled out of her reverie or constructed a better façade to conceal it.  Either way, Robin finally had the excuse zhe needed not to press any further.

Pen made the odd announcement over breakfast that he wanted Macy and Robin to come with him to the Ice Kingdom.  The “want” part was clearly a lie, but Robin didn’t have the spoons to call him out for it, and zhe doubted anyone at the table was fooled by it anyway.  Except maybe Galé, but the guy was more perceptive than he seemed. One time zhe’d left Pen’s bedroom door ajar and put a bucket of water on top of it, and somehow Galé had not only noticed the trap but tricked Robin into triggering it zhirself.  Unable to conceptualize of zhirself as a fool, zhe had thenceforth presumed Galé to be a mastermind.

“Sounds good,” said Macy.  “I’ve been wanting to spend more time with Penny anyways; I want to get to know her better.”

Robin raised an eyebrow in confusion.  “You hang out with Penny all the time.”

“Fine,” she admitted with a sigh.  “I’ve been wanting an excuse to get out of the pop quiz on Twosday.”

“Isn’t the point of pop quizzes that you don’t know when they’re coming?” Archie asked without looking up from her calculator.

“Yeah, but I consulted with the spirits of the forest and they said there’d be a pop quiz on Twosday.”

“You mean you peeked at the teacher’s schedule.”

Macy harrumphed.  “I had a squirrel do it for me, so it technically counts.”

“So you’ll do it?” asked Archie.  “That’s good to hear. It’ll do you some good to get a change of scenery without running away from home in the middle of the day and losing three of your limbs.”

“What?”  Macy attempted to take a swig of orange juice but was so thrown by that statement that she missed.  “Limbs? What? No, I’m good. No more making everyone worried like that. Honest. I’m cool now. Like you.”

Archie shrugged.  “If you want to think I’m cool, that’s fine.  Good to know that you’re abandoning the limb story, though.  That always seemed a little off.”

“Oh.”  Somehow Macy had forgotten her highly mutated version of the fight with the Grass Dragon.  “I guess it’s a good thing, huh?”

“You’re a natural storyteller, kid.”

“I’m not a— you think I’m a good storyteller?”

“Sure, that too.”

Macy felt a swell of positivity.  “Mathematical.”

* * *

They set off that same day.  Macy, unused to the concept of having stuff worth packing when going on an actual trip, brought every material possession of hers — her collector’s guide to coinage, along withthe beginnings of an actual collection; a much larger wardrobe than she had any reasonable expectation of going through in a few days; a backpack stuffed with school supplies, none of which she expected to touch; a collection of library books she always made sure to diligently return to the library and then inevitably check back out again when she left; even the Root Sword, “just in case.”  Robin brought nothing, as far as Macy could tell, but she’d thought that before and it had turned out zhe had an entire pantry’s worth of herbs and whatnot, so who could say?

As Lisby threw the last of Macy’s bags into the back of a waiting carriage, Macy helped Penny get up into the back seat.  The poor girl didn’t quite have the leg strength to make the leap from ground level to the window. Luckily, Macy never skipped leg day.  “Going up?” she asked as she grabbed Penny by the midsection, vaulting into the air and rolling through the carriage window to an accompaniment of Pen’s startled gasps.

As she was sailing through, Macy caught a knee on the windowframe, losing her momentum and tumbling onto the leather-wrapped seat.  Wheezing in pain, she sat up as the world righted itself around her. Beneath the ringing in her ears and the blood pumping through her nut heart, she could just make out Penny’s excited giggling.  Sounded like her niece had a better landing than she did, at least.

Then there was a click and Robin opened the carriage door on the other side, ukulele in hand.  “It wasn’t locked,” zhe said simply.

Macy straighted herself up and closed the door behind Robin.  “I knew that. I just thought this would be more exciting.”

“Ooh, is that a mandolin?” asked Penny, eyeing Robin’s ukulele.  “I love the mandolin!”

“I don’t know what a mandolin is, so probably.”  Robin strummed an open chord, which was very clearly out of tune.  “Whatever it is, I’m pretty good at  _ mandolin _ it!”

Pen groaned from the driver’s seat of the carriage as he gripped the horse’s reins.  “Please tell me this isn’t the quality of backseat commentary you intend to keep up for the whole duration of the trip.”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.  Hey Penny, you know any good shanties?”

“Don’t answer that.”

“I know one!” shouted Penny, making Macy’s ear ring once more.  “It goes like, um, ‘my old man has one foot left’ or something like that.”

Robin nodded, conjuring an illusory lyric sheet.  Zhe was improving greatly under Charlie’s tutelage; the squiggled lyrics were almost recognizable as hangul.  “Oh yeah, ‘Two Left Feet.’ I learned that one from Jake. He did all sorts of fancy stuff on the viola when he played it, but that sounds like a lot of work so I just vamp between C and G.  Just don’t tell Jake about that; he’s  _ terrified _ of vamps.”

Pen groaned loudly.  “You’d best get used to it,” said the horse.  “I’m just going to start walking now.”

And thus their journey began, with reluctant hoofsteps and an out of tune C chord accompanying a declaration of an old man being a bad dancer.  Robin, Macy, and Penny rotated turns singing verses, but since none of them knew more than four with any consistency, it wasn’t long before they began improvising lyrics that were just as discordant as the accompaniment.  By the time the horse (guided minimally by a nearly unresponsive Pen) pulled to a stop in a parking spot outside a roadside motel, Penny was singing about how “if I can’t do something bad / then that’s really, really great!” over a ukulele whose strings were by now so detuned that the underlying chord was indecipherable.

* * *

That evening, Penny asked Macy to tell her a bedtime story.  Robin had offered to fact-check, but Pen apparently didn’t care about whether his daughter was falling asleep to accurate information, for he instead insisted that he and Robin should share some drinks at the bar downstairs and leave the kids to their own devices.  (“I’m not a kid!” shouted Macy.) Robin wasn’t sure how much there was to know about Pen, but when he offered to pay for drinks zhir mind was made up.

As the adults left, Macy began rifling through her luggage to find a book to read to Penny.  “What kind of stories do you like? Swords & sorcery? Romance? Coin-related trivia?”

“I like good stories,” Penny insisted.  “Tell me a good story.”

Macy shut the flap on her luggage.  “How about the story of the time I—”

“No!”  The peanut shook her head vigorously.  “You’ve already told me that story.”

“I didn’t say what story I was going to tell.”

“You only ever tell one story about yourself.”

Macy opened her mouth to protest, but no words came out.  That was true enough, after all. “Alright,” she eventually sighed.  “I’ll tell you a different story.”

“Is it a good story?”

“It’s a very good story.”  She sat down on the edge of Penny’s bed, then immediately stood back up.  She imagined herself as her brother Galé, standing in front of her like a master orator before his audience in their father’s bedroom.  “Och,” she said to get into character. “Och och och. Aye, I’ve got quite tha masterful yarn,  _ núdalín _ .”

Penny giggled, then yawned.  “I like yarn.”

“Good.”  Macy cleared her throat for thirteen seconds.  “ _ Trí chéad _ years wain bach, yar were a twaddle o’ people what camped a’ side win la Sienna—”

“Stop!”  Penny squeezed her pillow against the sides of her head.  “You’re doing the accent wrong, I can’t understand you. Do it right or don’t do it at all!”

Macy rolled her eyes.  “Picky, picky. Three hundred years ago or whatever, there were a bunch of people in the mountains, okay?  Let me think, it was Princess Bubblegum, the Candy Corn guy, a robot or something, her cousin who I’ve never heard of but okay, a goblin, and, uh, someone else.”

“Marceline Bubblegum!” shouted Penny.

“No, I don’t think so.  She’s not a part of this story.”

“What do you mean?  What kind of story has the Princess but not her wife?”

“You know Marceline wasn’t always the Princess’s wife, right?” Macy asked with a giggle.

Penny simply stared at her blankly.  She  _ didn’t _ know that.  Never in her eight years of life had she known two people to start being married when they hadn’t been, nor to stop when they hadn’t.  In her mind, marriage wasn’t a thing people did but a thing they were. She knew that there was a ceremony involved at some point, but she hadn’t given any consideration to the state of the world before such a ceremony.  Bonnie and Marcie had been married all her life, and surely always had been even before. While she was wrong, of course, there was a sort of wisdom born of this detachment from the passage of time, a wisdom which we mostly lose as we age — though some are wise enough to gain it back.

Macy sighed, stood up, and shuffled through her luggage again and pulled out a hefty tome.  “If you’re going to be judgemental, you get coin facts.” Despite protests, it wasn’t long before Penny was lulled to sleep out of sheer boredom.

Downstairs, Pen and Robin were on their fifth round of apple cider vinegar.  After Pen had insulted Robin’s ukulele skills, zhe had insisted to his doubt that had zhe actually been trying zhe would have been pretty good.  He had asked zhir to prove it, so zhe’d tuned zhir instrument and started taking requests. Reluctantly, Pen had to admit zhe was quite a virtuoso, although it may have helped that zhe basically became a disco ball to accentuate zhir music.  The more zhe played, the more other patrons started paying for zhir drinks, and the more determined Pen became to outlast zhir.

“You believe me yet?” Robin asked, fading out zhir light show with the last bars of zhir rendition of ‘The Island Song’ (although zhir stripes were still a little wobbly).  “You admit I’m super talented an’ awesome?”

“No,” lied Pen.  “Shut up. I can’t believe I’m even bringing you out here anyway.”

“Nice subject change, you— you— subject changer.”

“I’m serious.  I’m super serious, all the time, but right now I’m super-dee-duper serious.  I’m doing, like, stuff to keep Jugland secure, and meanwhile you just waltz on in here doing the charleston conga and some other dance moves.”  He belched. “You’re internalizing all our affairs, and you’re friends with Finn. Y’could be spying for the Princess, you know?”

“That’s ridiculous.  I’m an out-and-proud Juglander.  Juglandite. Whatever the toponym is.  I’ll prove it. I’ll play the Jugland anthem.”

Had Pen been less sloshed, he would have asked, “How would that prove anything?”  Instead, he said, “We don’t have an anthem.”

“I’ll write one then.”  Zhe strummed a few chords, making an annoyed “Tch!” between each one, before settling on an F/C#.  “Oh Jugland,” zhe caterwauled, “we love the gates of Jugland, ho!” GmM7/D. “O Jugland, whose roofs are ever something snow!”  C7add#11no3. “O Jugland, you, uh, um, you, I don’t know!”

“No, no, no,” said Pen, signaling for the bartender to bring out another vinegar.  “Say something about jays and magpies. We love that sorta stuff.”

“Right, right, right.”

The two of them passed the time like that, drafting up more and more of this anthem, occasionally taking suggestions from their growing audience.  Excluding the numerous occasions they would attempt to slip barbs directed toward each other into the lyrics, it went well. Unfortunately, nobody bothered to write any of it down, so the next morning the both of them woke up with no memory of what they had actually come up with.

* * *

Although the previous day’s journey had gotten them most of the way to their destination, the rest of it was through a snowed-over path, which made it slow goings for the long-suffering horse.  Outside, storm clouds swirled in a distant blizzard ravaging some coast. A clan of cool cats crossed ahead of them, forcing them to stop as the blue-furred felines carried poor captive penguins to the blue fir forest off to the east.  This was the Ice Kingdom.

“Those poor penguins,” Penny sighed, looking out the window.

Macy patted her on the back as she took out her phone and snapped a picture.  “Don’t worry about it. It’s just the circle of life.”

“That’s right harsh, Aunt Damy.”

“It’s just how it do.”

Around midday, as the bright mountain sun reflected off the sheer-white snow, the capital of the Ice Kingdom finally loomed overhead — a great mountain with a scowling angry face carved into the side, with a permanent avalanche going off one side and an enormous geodesic dome attached to the back.  Macy immediately recognized Ice Palace Mountain from its depiction on the Ice Kingdom currency listed in Rednose’s book. In person, it was much more intimidating. She imagined it could stand up at any moment, pick up the carriage like a jelly bean, and swallow it whole as the horse watched.

She gulped sympathetically, sticking her hand out of the window to feel the bite of the colder-than-ice breeze.  “So, we’re finally here, huh?” she asked, in full belief that her voice wasn’t betraying her shattered nerves.

“Nope,” replied Pen.  “We’re going a bit further.  We’ll be residing in a tenement on the Icy U campus.”

Macy blinked.  “Wait, why?”

“That’s what this whole trip is about,” said the horse.  “Don’t you know anything? You freaking idiot.”

“Hey!” Robin and Pen protested simultaneously.  “Don’t be mean to Macy!” Macy giggled as the two then glared at each other, each frustrated that the other had stolen their line.

“Anyway,” Pen continued, “this deal is with the Ice King, but in his position as Dean of Icy University.  Some of the researchers there want access to the old Jugland mines, which have been mostly disused for a long while.  They think there could yet be valuable mineral artifacts down there, so they’re willing to subsidize a resurgence in mining operations in exchange for access to those operations.”

“Ah, so that’s how it is.”  Macy put a finger to her lips.  “Wait, no, I still don’t get it.”

“Here’s what I don’t get,” said Robin.  “Is it the Ice  _ King _ or the Ice  _ Thing? _   I’ve heard it both ways.”

“Both,” replied Pen.  “Ice Thing is his name, Ice King is his title.  Well, I suppose technically his name is Gunter, but nobody calls him that anymore.  Not since the Great Gum War, anyway.”

Pen’s logic was faulty.  A name isn’t something you’re given and then have, it’s something people call you.  A name nobody calls you is no name; it should be cast aside and forgotten. By Pen’s argument, the Ice King’s name should have been Orgalorg, the Breaker of Worlds, since he had been that before he had been Gunter.  He had been that since before there were worlds to break. Nobody in the carriage knew this, however, so nobody corrected him.

Instead, Macy asked him what he remembered about the time before the Great Gum War, so he spent what little time remained of their trip regaling her with childhood memories while Robin begrudgingly and unnecessarily took the reins.  He even told her about the first time he had met Finn Mertens, when he was but a wee  _ bairn _ younger than his daughter was now.  Finn and Jake had been tasked with bringing his father to justice over pudding crimes by the “dogmatic” Princess Bubblegum, and he had attempted to attack them in defense of the Duke.

Macy smirked.  “I bet that didn’t go well.”

“I’m lucky they were so understanding.  Much more so than the Princess, who  _ still _ hasn’t forgiven him.”  He chuckled. “I got her good at the next grand meeting of Ooo royalty, though.  Me and the squirrel who hates Jake (Glob rest his soul) dogpiled her. It was hilarious.”

“Hold on,” said Robin, moving zhir mouth to zhir back so zhe could address the carriage while keeping zhir eyes on the road.  “My great-great-granddad’s told me this story before. That wasn’t her at the meeting, it was Finn and Jake  _ dressed _ like her, and they only played beat up so’s to make you feel good about yerself.  Also for some reason he left out the part about the squirrel.”

Pen clutched at his chest, his toupee standing on end, clearly shocked to have had his thunder stolen decades after the thunderclap.  “What!” he exclaimed. “Oh, come on! Although that does explain why there were two of her.”

Robin steered the horse into a parking spot, where a white-feathered bird with a large bushy tail walked up and opened the door.  As Penny leapt out of the window and into a snowbank, Macy somehow tripped over herself attempting to pick up her luggage from a sitting position before tossing the bag unceremoniously to the bird.  Macy gingerly stepped out of the carriage holding Penny’s backpack, which she gave to the girl as she sat up.

“Don’t want to forget this,” she warned.  “Always keep careful track of your belongings.”

The bird dumped Macy’s luggage on top of her, sending her toppling into the snowbank.  He introduced himself as Mr. Klein, the tenement owner, and walked them to the room where they were staying.  After entering an ice-brick building with a surprisingly warm interior and walking them up three flights of stairs, he let them into a well-furnished room and handed two keys to Pen.  Pen tossed one of the keys to Macy, thanked Mr. Klein, and then ran over to a small coffee table in the corner of the room to take out a notebook.

“What is it?” asked Macy.

He began hastily scribbling a penguin.  “I need to get this in my scrapbook before the image leaves my head.  Pengu, Macy. Pengu.”

She began digging through her backpack pockets, dropping her keys into one, and pulled out her phone.  “I already got a picture, though, lemme—”

“Pengu!” Pen insisted.  Macy backed off, startled.

“Hey, Aunt Damy,” said Penny, tugging on Macy’s sleeve.  She turned to look at the girl, whose eyes were massive and pleading.  “Do you wanna go outside and show me how to be a pro-body?”

Macy smirked as her heart filled up.  There wasn’t anything she wanted to do more in the whole world.  “Yeah, that sounds fun.”

“Or,” counteroffered Robin, “you could stay inside and I could teach you some dirty words.  How does that sound, Hal?”

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” Pen _ hal _ igon said dismissively, not even cognizant of his name change as he drew and then erased this penguin’s beak for the third time.

“Thanks!” said Penny.  “Alright, bye Macy.”

“Why bye?” asked Macy, skilting.

“Because you’ve got to go do the thing.”

“I wasn’t going to— you know what?”  Macy glanced outside. She probably wouldn’t get snow like this for a while, if she didn’t want to make a trek up the side of a precarious mountain pass.  “Your loss. I’ll be outside; you can come join me when you’re done.” She took her luggage off her head, dumped it on the ground, and walked out of the room, then walked back into the room just before the door closed to grab her backpack and walk out again.

“Bye, Macy,” said Robin with a wave as Macy left the room for the second time.  Zhe turned to face Penny. “Alright, you ready to learn some grimy utterances?” But Penny had already grabbed a model boat from her own backpack and begun flying it around the room while making train noises.

* * *

Elsewhere on campus, a conclave of professors gathered around a long table in a heated underground room pulsing with sigils of abjuration.  A figure in long white robes that obscured most of her form, with several beakers attached by a rope to her hip, was finishing up a set of similar runes on the table itself, tracing it with a gloved finger she had dipped in one of those beakers.  As she did so, a sensation of nullity passed over those seated. “The seal is complete,” she said, her voice cutting through the monotonous drone of the ventilation. “We won’t be spied upon.”

“If you ask me, it’s a bit much,” grumbled a worm who was seated on the table taking minutes.  “Nobody would try that hard to eavesdrop on a faculty meeting.”

“Speak for yourself, Professor Wormworthwoodward III,” cautioned the woman sitting at the head of the table, a human woman with pale cerulean cybernetic implants all over her body contrasted against a dark cobalt lab coat.  She insisted on wearing the lab coat at all times, “just in case.”

A tall figure in an orange jumpsuit with a grid-faced mask nodded in agreement.  “If the wrong sort of person learned of this deal, the results could be lichtacular,” xie said in a low, grave voice.  “Professor Whyzard’s wards are essential.”

“Who?” asked the woman in the white robes as she sat down, her beakers clanking.

“I apologize, I meant  _ Science _ Whyzard.”

“Oh, right, yes.”  She coughed nervously.

“Well, I don’t see why  _ I’m _ essential,” grumbled Armand Wormworthwoodward III, who for brevity will hereafter be simply called Professor Worm.  “Nor the Professors Threadbare or Petrikov. It’s not our department.” Across the table, a brown sock puppet with a large fake mustache, waved nervously.

“All the senior faculty means  _ all _ the senior faculty,” said Simon Petrikov, wearing a tweed jacket over a floral shirt and a black bucket hat covering white hair.  “If Dr. Gross’s project is successful, Icy University will achieve new levels of prominence. There’s nobody this won’t affect, so we all get a say.”

The cyborg nodded in agreement, taking a packet of papers out of her lab coat and hitting them against the table to straighten them.  “If that’s out of everyone’s system, I’d like to begin the meeting. Wormworthwoodward, begin dictation.” Professor Worm began scribbling away with a pencil.  “The First Marquess Jugland has arrived to sign the deal, but he sent ahead of him a revised version of the contract we extended. Our first order of business will be running through that contract to pass any relevant notes to the Ice Thing, since he’s so outrageously unfocused at all times that we can’t possibly expect him to do it on his own.”

“Well, gee, Heidrun,” came a voice from nowhere and yet everywhere, “tell us how you really feel?”

“Who’s there?”  Dr. Gross immediately dropped the papers and stood up, looking around frantically.  She pressed a button on the side of her face, and her one robotic eye glowed green and began whirring as it scanned the room in other optical frequencies.  “Where are you?”

“I mean, it’s absolutely true,” the voice continued, “but you probably shouldn’t talk that way about your boss.  Leave that to me.”

Simon buried his face in his hands, pressing his broad-rimmed spectacles into his eye sockets.  “GOLB  _ dammit, _ Marceline.”

A figure reclining in the air above the middle of the long table suddenly ceased to be invisible.  Marceline Bubblegum was a tall human with pale blue-grey skin, sporting a black-and-red jacket with collars high enough to violate several city ordinances and thick enough to protect against several classified ordnances.  Her long black hair, pulled into a ponytail, was the only part of her body touching the table. A red skull-shaped pick, as for a guitar, danced between her fingers. She looked so out of place it had to be deliberate: She had the air about her of someone who knew she wasn’t wanted here and relished it.

Lazily, she floated over to Science Whyzard and poked her in the nose, causing her to go limp from fright.  “Boop. You really should learn to sweep a room before setting up abjurations; someone could have been spying on you.  That could have been real bad. Anywho, what’s this meeting about?”

Simon pinched the bridge of his nose.  “Marcie, what are you doing here?”

The vampire shrugged, settling into a cross-legged seated position above the table in front of the zonked-out Science Whyzard.  “Dunno. Bored.”

Dr. Gross collected herself, deactivating her eye and clearing her throat.  “Marceline. As Queen Consort of the Candy Kingdom, you represent a foreign political interest.  In accordance with Article 5 of the Treaty of Lumpsembourg which need I remind you your Princess helped draft, I hereby request that you vacate this area before I have you arrested.”

Marceline laughed, a terrifying, deep-throated laugh accompanied by briefly morphing her face into that of a wolf.  “You couldn’t if you tried,” she said, spreading her arms out as if daring her to make a move. “But yeah you’re right, I should go.  Hey, Simon, I’m gonna go grab some red, you want anything to eat?”

He sighed, sinking his face deeper into his hands.  “Korean,” he mumbled.

She shot him some finger guns he couldn’t see.  “Sure thing.” She floated backwards out of the room, opening the door without looking and closing it with her foot.  As soon as she was gone, Dr. Gross attempted to get the meeting back on track, but it took several minutes before everyone was mentally present again.

Floating up the stairwell, Marceline took a blobfish out of her pocket and pulled its fin, extending it into a black lace parasol with a slimy, fish-pungent handle.  She started humming to herself as she reached the top, attempting to pin down a melody that had popped into her head. She gave up just when she reached the glass door at the top that led outside.  An estimated ninety-nine percent of musical ideas don’t survive the first five minutes if they don’t occur during a jam session. It’s a terrible fate, but there’s not much one can do.

She stepped outside, bracing her parasol against the mountain winds so it didn’t blow away and subject her to the burning light of the evil sun.  She wasn’t sure why the bright light reflected off the snow didn’t harm her, but she wasn’t going to look a horse’s gift in the mouth. Still, it worried a corner of her brain, so she sat down at a nearby bench, tucked the umbrella under her arm so it wouldn’t move, and lathered some “SPF 2 Gazillion” sunscreen on her face.  It wasn’t as strong as the “SPF 4 Gazillion” stuff, but it would do the trick in a pinch.

With that done, she once more took to the skies, scouring the ground below for any convenient red.  She wasn’t hungry per se, but if she waited until she was, things could get complicated. Below her, university students milled about, hustling across the treacherous multileveled slopes and jumping up sheer rock faces to get to classes on time.  It was that kind of go-getter attitude that set Icy U apart from the competition.

Something unusual caught her eye, a gleam of pinkish metal against the white snow on the lowest part of the cliff.  She flew down to investigate, relishing the shade of the cliff as she descended. A mountain goat bleated next to her ear.  She bleated back. It ran away. Yeah, it  _ better _ run.

The source of the metallic gleam was a young macadamia nut in a heavy green jacket, brandishing a sword with roots on its hilt as she interrogated a penguin.  The penguin quacked, and she nodded in agreement. “Disturbing,” she concurred. “I’ll have to investigate. As you were, citizen.”

The penguin waddled away, and Macy sheathed her sword, oblivious to Marceline floating up behind her.  The vampire floated right up to her back, then leaned down to where her ear was obscured by her hood and whispered, “Hey.”

Macy freaked out and yelled, leaping five feet in the air and spinning around.  She landed in a splitz with the expression of someone who had not intended to land in a splitz.  “… _ ow,” _ she whined, holding the sword out shakily.

“Relax,” said Marceline, redirecting the sword away with a finger.  “I’m just your friendly neighborhood vampire. Saw you messing around with your sword down here and thought I’d check it out.  Hey, by the way, have you got any red I can eat?”

Macy nodded.  Wordlessly, she reached into her backpack, somewhere underneath the back of her coat, pulled out a red flare gun, and handed to Marceline.  She extended her fangs into it, slurping out its color, and then tossed it back, where it bounced off her nut head and into the snow.

“Thanks.”  She cast her eyes to the sword, and then back to the nut’s face.  “You know, you look oddly familiar. Were you ever in an off-Breadway musical, by any chance?  Something about a bird war?”

Macy, standing up, nodded reflexively before shaking her head.  She still wasn’t quite sure this was real. “You’re… I… you… famous… I…”

Marceline laughed, then sat down in the snow and took out a banjolele.  “Yeah, I am,” she said as she began plucking it aimlessly. “Marceline the Vampire Queen, in living color.  So to speak.” She strummed a chord and then grimaced. The cold had done a number on the instrument’s intonation.

Macy nodded again as Marceline began to tune.  “Wow. You really are. I look up to you so much.  I’m amazed at your adventurer cred, and I’ve listened to all of your songs.”

“Cool, then could you listen to this D chord and tell me which string’s out of tune?”  Marceline played the chord in question, which sounded like a dying china shop.

Macy grimaced.  “No.”

“Thanks anyway.”  Marceline put the banjolele away; her eyes drifted to the sword again.  “I think I recognize that weapon, too. Isn’t that Finn’s backup sword, that he uses whenever his normal sword is broken or stolen or more cursed than usual?”

Macy looked at the weapon.  She had honestly forgotten she was carrying it.  “Oh, yeah, he gave it to me exactly one hundred days ago.  The flare gun, too.” She picked up the now-white gun as if to demonstrate.

Marceline snapped her fingers in realization.  “Oh, you must be Huntress Wizard’s new protégé — the Duke’s adopted daughter.  I guess I probably recognize you from visiting the orphanage with Bonnie. It’s Tracey, right!”

Macy put her hands to her head in elation.  “I can’t believe Marceline the Vampire Queen almost knows my name!”  A beat. “It’s Macy, though. As in Macadamia.”

“Sorry.  Well, it was nice meeting you, Macy, but I see you’ve got your hands busy solving the personal problems of flightless birds, so I’ll leave you to it while I go gather supplies to teepee my bandmates’ residences under the guise of purchasing microwavable Korean food.”

Macy may have learned half her social skills from Robin, but she still recognized a veiled invite when she heard one.  “I’m sure I can take some time off,” she meandered. “To be honest I was mostly being polite toward that penguin. I’m pretty sure he’s actually just waiting for rocks to hatch.”

“Eh, I’ve seen weirder things hatch.”  She held out her hand, Macy took it, and the two took to the skies.

* * *

“What does this symbol mean?” asked Penny, pointing at an angular block S Robin had scribbled on a napkin.

“I don’t know,” confessed Robin, “but it pops up all the time in ancient messageboards, so it’s probably some kind of twenty-first century flirtation.  All I know is it looks real cool so when I’m using the alphabet I always use this symbol to write out the S word. Can you pronounce it?”

“Yeah,” fumed Pen as he brewed a pot of late-night coffee.  “Can you pronounce it, oh corruptible daughter of mine?”

Penny furrowed her brow as she studied the napkin inscription.  “S… sk… sh… f…” She pressed her finger against her forehead, shut her eyes, then opened them again with renewed vigor.  She cleared her throat, took in a deep breath, then said, “Slough!”

Robin projected flashing lights around the room in celebration.  “Very good!” zhe exclaimed. “That was a tough one. Now you know all the dirtiness words.”

Pen shook his head, the percolation of the beans echoing the percolation of his thoughts.  “Disgusting,” he spat. “I can’t believe you’re teaching my daughter something so uncouth.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t stop me, Hal.”

“Unlike that tyrant Princess Bubblegum, I have no interest in preventing anyone from learning anything no matter how crude I may find it to be.”

“Does she actually do that?”

“I don’t know, but it sounds like something she’d do.”

Just then there was a click from the door as someone on the other side unlocked it.  Everyone turned to look as the door opened a tiny bit, creaking disproportionately loudly, before Macy gently kicked it open, pink star-shaped sunglasses on her face and a sixty-pack of toilet paper on her back.  “Word down, fools,” she said. “I’m back.”

Pen walked over and took the toilet paper from her.  “I hope this wasn’t for dinner,” he said.  “I was about to put on some noodles.  Vegetarian, like you like (and as a bonus like Robin hates).”

“A reasonable, but unwarranted, concern,” she assured him, taking off her sunglasses and slipping them into her backpack pocket, whence issued an immediate snap of breaking plastic.  “I’m merely holding onto those as a courtesy to one Queen Marceline the Vampire, uh, Royal. Also, I’m not actually vegetarian.”

Pen immediately dropped the toilet paper on his foot.  “Ow!” he snapped. “Hold on, uh,  _ the _ Marceline?  Small world. How’d that happen, exactly?”

She recounted the events of the day, and they were suitably impressed.  Granted, Macy may have played up the importance of her interviews with the local animals prior to the encounter, but it wasn’t by much.  After that, Penny stared at Macy in admiration as Pen prepared dinner. The whole time. Truthfully, Macy was rather unnerved, and when Pen finally set the table she was glad for the distraction.

Briefly, that is.  As soon as Robin did zhir prayer to Tourmaline, Penny poured half her noodles into her mouth, swallowed, belched, and then asked, “So what was it like talking to Marceline?  Did you get her autograph? Did you do music? What time is it?”

“I already told you all that.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t paying attention because it was too awesome.”

“That’s fair.”  Macy twirled her fork in her noodles.  “Honestly, it didn’t feel like that big of a deal.  She’s just a person, you know? She’s really…  _ chill, _ I guess is how I would describe it.  I mean, I’m in a way different situation than the last time I saw her, but I honestly don’t think that would have changed how she treated me.”

Penny slammed her hands on the table, rattling it.  “What do you  _ mean _ the last time?”

“Oh, uh, Princess Bubblegum—” she ignored a harsh grunt from Pen at the mention of Bonnibel — “would visit the candy orphanage sometimes, and when Marceline wasn’t touring with The #1 Babes or whatever other group she happened to be a part of—” she ignored a startled gasp from Penny at the mention of a time when Marceline wasn’t a member of the #1 Babes — “she’d sometimes come with her.  Grand Vizier Lolly, too. Princeso had to ask Marceline to stop because she kept scaring the kids by shapeshifting into their worst nightmares.” She scoffed. “Talk about a vibeharsh.”

“That wasn’t the last time you saw her,” Robin interjected.

“What do you mean?”

“It was at the calendar banquet, on the day you got adopted.  Marceline was there with the rest of the royal family.”

“Come on, Robin, you know what’s not what I meant by ‘see’.”

“No, I don’t.”

“No, you don’t.”  Macy sighed, staring into her cooling pasta.  “That was a big day, though. I haven’t heard from Masse since then.  I know he only wants to make up in person, but I feel like I should reach out or he’ll slip away.  And then there’s…”

“And then there’s what?”

Macy quickly shoved some noodles into her mouth.  “Mnmphng,” she mumbled. She could feel the warmth rising to her nut cheeks, compensating for the lukewarm sauce.  She had been going to mention Princess Torte, whom she had met for the first and last time that day, and who happened to be Marceline and Bonnibel’s adopted daughter.  That would have been frivolous, though, and opened up a topic of conversation she’d rather not have dwelt on. She still wasn’t sure how to feel about what went down in the chocolate aviary.  Besides, it was unrealistic of her to expect to hear from Princess Torte again. She probably had bigger things to worry about.

* * *

The smell of dollar-store Korean being taken out of its airtight microwave seal was enough to make Marceline glad she only ate red.  Simon took the food and set it on the balcony below the roof where she lay stargazing. He held it up in a silent offer for her to share; she held up her hand and attempted not to visibly crinkle her nose.  The professor shrugged and began eating with a pair of chopsticks he retrieved from the inner pocket of his tweed jacket. Marceline had always figured you could tell a lot about a person from what they deemed important enough to keep in their pockets, but she wasn’t sure what this signified about her oldest friend.

“…hey, I’m sorry about earlier,” she said.  “I guess a thousand years was enough to train me out of expecting any semblance of order worth respecting.”

“No, it’s fine.  It proved that Professor Science Whyzard’s runes weren’t working right, so we managed to bolster them using some ancient spells I deciphered nine years ago.  If you were actually trying to spy on us, you’d be really locked out now. At any rate I should have known better than to not pay attention to you for ten minutes.  You’re like one of those little dogs.”

Marceline chuckled, then sighed and looked up at the stars.  In truth, she  _ had _ been spying; Bonnie had asked her to learn what she could while she was up here, once Ambassador Corn had told her about the deal with Jugland.  She wasn’t sure why that would make her suspicious, but she’d learned long ago that trying to argue on the Duke’s behalf was like talking to a brick wall.  Then she’d blown her cover after Dr. Gross insulted her and Simon’s drummer, as if this had been her first espionage operation. Her heart just wasn’t in it.

“Homesick?” asked Simon.  Marceline hadn’t noticed she was looking southwest, toward the Candy Kingdom capital.

“Yeah,” she said truthfully.  “Catching up with you has been great, don’t get me wrong — the dynamic’s totally different from when we’re on tour — but too much of what we have in common intersects with ‘dwelling on the past,’ and ever since Doctor Princess became my therapist she’s recommended against that.”

“We could always work on that new song idea, then.”

“I don’t want to do that without the rest of the band, especially Finn.”

“Fair enough.”  He swallowed the last of the Korean food and stretched.  “These old bones can’t handle the cold, so I’ll head off to bed.”

“Night.”  She waited until he slid the glass door of the balcony shut, then took out a blue lamprey phone and dialed up Bonnibel.

After a few rings, her wife picked up.  “Yello?” she asked with a yawn.

“Bonnie, the sun’s just set for  _ me. _   Why are  _ you _ already tired?”

“I’ve had such a day, don’t get me started.  There was some mild panic in the residential district after someone mistook a smoke alarm for a tornado siren, but thanks to Crunchy’s quick action, order’s been maintained.  I’ll probably have to wrest control back from him tomorrow, but that’s tomorrow.” She yawned again. “I’ve missed you these past few weeks.”

“I’ve missed you too, Bonnie.”  She made an exaggerated kissing noise into the phone and was delighted to hear her wife’s giggle.  “I’ll be back before you know it.”

“Did you learn anything at college?”

Marceline rolled her eyes.  Sure, it made sense to talk circumspectly about espionage and the like, but that didn’t make it sound any less stupid.  “No, I couldn’t get into the right part of the library. They, uh, tagged the books. Also don’t ask me to go to the library again, okay?  I’m your wife, not a librarian.”

“I know, and I’m sorry.”  A beat. “I’m just worried, is all, and I knew you would do it.  I knew you  _ could _ do it, because you’re amazing.”

“I couldn’t, though.”

“Eh.”

“Are Pepmint and Tortle still up?”

“Peppermint Boy’s doing a livestream for his Helpernet show, but Prinzregententorte’s still up.  Tortle!” she shouted away from the phone. After a moment, “Princess Torte! Ah, there you are. Your mom’s on the phone.”

A second later, a high-pitched voice came through the phone.  “Hi!” she shouted, loud enough to hurt Marceline’s ears. “Did you get me any cool books from the library?”

“I didn’t go to the library yet, Tortle.”

“Get me some cool books from the library, ‘kay?”

Marceline chuckled.  “I will. How was your day?”

And for half an hour, she stayed out on Simon’s roof, not minding the cold, and simply talked.

* * *

The next day, Pen decided he didn’t want Robin teaching his daughter any more desecrated vocabulary, so after a breakfast of quantum-tunneling less-than-instant oatmeal he asked Macy to take Penny to the university library, the one place on campus Robin was unable to enter due to zhe would be really bored if zhe did.  Unfortunately, this plan had the foreseeable consequence that, except for when he went to actually sign the agreement that afternoon, he would be stuck with Robin all day. This was his burden, though, and he would not back down.

Auntie Damy Awesomesauce wanted to live up to her name, so rather than head straight to the library, she instead took Penny down to the cliff-face area she had hung out the previous day.  For the rest of the morning, she attempted to immerse her in the world of nature-protecting she had specifically asked for the other day, even taking her on a magical quest through the taiga to save the penguin’s unhatched young — or rather to confirm that it was, in fact, a rock.  Penny, however, was listless and bored the whole time, so after that and a quick lunch of mixed berries and protein bars, Macy took her to the library after all.

“Now, look,” Macy was saying as she entered, “I like books as next as the nice gal, but—”

“Shhhhhhhhhhhh!”  The blond-haired Turtle Princess, with her icy crown, shushed Macy from behind the desk where she overlooked the library.  Turtle Princess was a librarian first, a publisher second, a historian third, and the Ice King’s wife sixth, maybe seventh.  When she shushed, it had more force than the mightiest blizzard, and the room fell instantly silent.

“—but I really have a hard time picturing you being more engaged by this than by penguin paternity,” she continued, whispering at a barely audible level.  She eyed Turtle Princess until the reptile gave her a slow, approving nod.

“Oh, I love literature,” Penny replied at the same volume.  “Poetry especially. I hope this library has stuff by Lacrima Winterskin or Marshall Marhojkinz.”

“I have no idea who either of those people are.”

“Or maybe Ti— ooh!  There’s the poetry section!”  She said that last line a bit too loud and got shushed again; it took a second before she recovered the nerve to drag Macy over there by the finger.  “Let’s see, oh, hey, they’ve got a whole  _ section _ for Winterskin.  I guess that makes sense, seeing as we’re in the Ice Kingdom.”

Macy watched as Penny began taking book after book off of the shelves.  “I take it you’ll be well-entertained, then.”

Penny turned on her heel to look at Macy, but in just five seconds she’d collected so many poetry books that their eyeline was interrupted.  “I’ll be fine on my own,” she said. “Ain’t nobody gonna try something in a library; not with Miss T. watching over us like a—”

“Shhhhhhhh!”

“—like an owl,” she whispered.  “I’ll be fine.”

“I’m not going to leave the library,” Macy promised.  “I’ll just be over in the cafe; feel free to join me.”

Penny shot Macy a finger-gun as she walked away; Macy returned it in kind, pacing backward through the stacks.  When she re-entered the main open central area of the library, she spun around and immediately bumped into a figure in a grey cloak.  She and the cloaked figure both immediately fell onto the ground with loud exclamations.

Amidst Turtle Princess’s shushing, Macy rubbed her head and stood up.  Her eyes widened when she saw the person she’d crashed into. What were the odds she’d bump into this person — literally — again, let alone so soon, when she wasn’t looking for them?

“You!” she whisper-shouted, pointing a finger an inch away from their face and nervously looking at Turtle Princess.  The princess shook her head, and Macy clammed up. That had been a bit too loud, and now she was on thin ice. No, wait, that was too much of a loaded phrase.  What was it Robin sometimes said? Dancing on celestine? Math it, she was on strike two.

“Me,” whisper-whispered Tiffany Oiler in agreement.

Macy began carefully tip-toeing around him to get to the library’s attached cafeteria, while also refusing to break eye contact.  Funny, in the reflection of his one cybernetic eye she looked almost disheveled. “What are you doing here?”

“Everything!”  Tiffany followed alongside her in lockstep.  “You obviously remember when I told you exactly one hundred days ago that I was working for the wonderful, fantastic, inimitable Dr. Heidrun Gross, right?”

“No.”

“I’m going to be honest with you, Macy.”  He moved to put a hand on her shoulder as they walked, but she shied away, so instead he put a hand on his hip.  “That betrays a startling lack of seriousness on your part. If you can’t recall basic details about people like that, then you’re failing at networking.  Had you taken the time to remember that, you might have learned that Dr. Gross is in fact employed by Icy University. Ice King Ice Thing provides her with resources, lab equipment, and political asylum, and in exchange she helps pass on her knowledge to impressionable university students.”

Macy considered asking why Dr. Gross needed asylum, but she figured that was probably impolite.  Instead, she asked, “Why do you know the exact number of days it’s been since the tournament? I mean, I know why  _ I _ know that, but why do  _ you?” _

He came to a halt, and for some bizarre reason Macy stopped alongside him.  “Because,” he said, holding his cloak over his mouth as his one robotic arm turned into a small whirring fog machine, “on that day you issued a challenge to me, like a, uh…”  He lifted the cloak higher. “Like an apple tree growing through a crack in the pavement, its roots pressing up against the road from beneath until the foundations crack. Wait, forget I said crack already.”

“I’ve already forgotten most of what you’re saying.”  Macy felt a cool breeze over her feet as the fake fog spread over them.

“And as even the mightiest road baulks before an unexpected thunderstorm,” Tiffany continued, a bit louder than before, “I failed, my dreams of dominance crushed under the weight of a thousand watery hammers.  Yet now I have changed even the winds, counting down the hours to my revolution on the calendar of destiny, so that I can prove once more my dominance over the oncoming storm.”

Macy raised an eyebrow incredulously.  Was this actually happening, here, now?  “So you’re saying you want round two, then.  I can dig it.”

“I want nothing more or less than the true sum of my experience to be made apparent!”  He spread his hands apart, revealing that both the inside of his cloak and a large assortment of bandoliers on his actual person were filled to the brim with various sports equipment, game pieces, and dice bags.  “Although the storm chooses its battlefield, the road maintenance crew chooses its preparations. Choose, Macadamia, the path which will lead to your loss at the hands of me, Tiffany Oiler!”

Macy glanced over at Turtle Princess, who was fuming.  “Quiet contest.”

“So be it.”  Tiffany pointed at himself with his thumb and winked.  “Soon, you’ll see exactly how quiet a master thief can be!”

Then Turtle Princess tackled him instantaneously from across the library.  Macy shrugged, whispering, “I win,” and resumed walking to the cafeteria.

* * *

Simon Petrikov, bored out of his mind at his seat on the long table in the heated underground room, bit off the eraser of yet another pencil.  He scooted his chair to allow Science Whyzard to pass by more easily, wheeling a large cauldron full of beakers of some substance she was using to paint runes on the walls.  Everyone else at the table, with the exception of the ever-stoic Gridface Princess, appeared similarly listless. Professor Worm was looking at pictures of apples on his phone.  Ice Thing was making, destroying, and re-making tiny ice horses. Even Dr. Gross was twiddling her thumbs.

Simon swallowed.  “I sincerely do think this is overkill,” he said at last.  “The regular runes would suffice. Besides which, nobody cares enough to spy.”

“Frankly, I agree,” said Science Whyzard, painting an intricate rune which consisted of six vertical and one horizontal line grouped in four pairs arranged in a square.  “However, the majority decision of the council stands, and with the King/Dean present, this isn’t the time to settle for adequacy.”

“Besides which,” huffed Professor Worm, “the fact remains that somehow, some way, the Hypernet knew this meeting took place.  That much, at the very least, was leaked.”

“Helpernet,” Science Whyzard corrected him, before putting her hand over her mouth, before taking her hand  _ out _ of her mouth and spitting out the science-magic ink that glowed in every color sequentially.

“I will never call it that.  My point was that there’s a high probability that someone’s interested in spying on us.”

“Could be that,” Gridface Princess, “or could be a leak from inside.  And since only those of us in these meetings know about these meetings, one of us in this room may not be who we seem.”

Professor Threadbare, the brown sock puppet with the large fake mustache, looked left and right with his googly eyes.  “Surely someone could also have merely noticed the sudden and unexplained disappearance of all of the university’s major faculty simultaneously across campus during normal active daylight hours and came to deduce that logical conclusion, yes?”

Gridface Princess shook her head.  “Too contrived.”

“I dunno,” came a voice from nobody in particular.  “It’s how  _ I _ figured out when you guys were meeting.”

Simon put his face in his hands again.  “GOLB dammit, Marceline.”

The vampire became visible next to Science Whyzard, eating a sandwich.  She passed the half-eaten ‘wich off to the whyzard, who grabbed it without thinking.  “Sorry about the entrance,” chuckled Marceline, “I just couldn’t help but notice that you still forgot to sweep the room before setting up the abjurations.  Hey, Ice Thing.”

“Hey, Marceline.”

“I  _ did _ sweep the room!” protested Dr. Gross.  “I used every scanner at my disposal!”

Marceline shrugged.  “Guess all your scanners suck worse than my fangs, Heidrun.”

The cyborg flushed in embarrassment.  “W-well, either way, you’re committing a war crime by being here, especially after having been forewarned yesterday.”

“No, I’m not.  This is actually my place.”  Marceline reached out behind her and ripped down a piece of drywall, behind which was another piece of drywall on which an ‘M’ was scratched.  “I liberated this bunker from a small company of vampires and crashed here a few times over the centuries, and I technically never gave y’all permission to use it.”  She shrugged, floating away. “But whatever, you guys can use it. This is the last time I’ll bother you here. The next time an invisible monster camps out here, you’ll regret pushing me away.”

As she slammed the door behind her, Simon lifted his head out of his hands, feeling a lump in his throat from embarrassment and/or inexplicably trying to swallow an eraser.  “You know,” he rasped, “she’s not wrong, technically.”

* * *

Macy sat in the library café, sipping a caffeinated smoothie she’d ordered four hours ago.  In the intervening time, Penny had repeatedly come up to her, asked for her opinion on a book she was interested in checking out, been frustrated with Macy’s inevitable inability to give a coherent response more engaging than “It’s fun,” and left in a huff.  Macy didn’t want to disappoint her niece like so, but if she actually budgeted the mental resources to get into these books, she’d be totally checked out and unreturnable for the rest of the night. She could either be a plebian or a savant, with nothing in between, and if she became a savant, she’d get kicked out of the library faster than Tiffany Oiler.

“Hey there, cool stuff,” came a voice from behind her.  Macy turned around, spilling the remainder of her drink, to see Marceline floating there in an oversized Icy U varsity jacket that she’d actually stolen from Simon’s wardrobe earlier that day.

“You!” she whisper-shouted, grabbing some napkins and sopping up the smoothie.

“Me,” Marceline agreed, leaning over and sucking the red from the spilt drink.  “I was stopping by here to pick up a book for my daughter, and I happened to spot you.  Small world, huh?”

Macy nodded.  “It’s super small, like it could fit inside a nutshell.  But it’s also super big, like the inside of a broom closet that’s super big.”

“What was that, exactly?” asked the vampire, raising an eyebrow incredulously.

Macy shrugged.  “I’ve had to read more poetry today than I did in my entire life up until now.  My niece is all about that stuff. The things we do for family, right?”

Marceline got a faraway look in her eyes.  “Yeah, we certainly do those things. But actually, it’s good you’re here, because my daughter—”  She hesitated, putting a finger to her bottom lip, formulating her next sentence carefully. “My daughter likes poetry a fair bit, and this library’s got a decent collection.  Maybe your niece could help by making a recommendation?” Despite knowing the Duke of Nuts personally, and thus understanding why this twelve-year-old had a niece, those words still felt weird in her mouth.

“I don’t rightly know.  Pr’aps.” Macy stood up and tossed the ball of soggy napkins into a trash can three meters away.  It went in with a loud schlep, and she tightened her fist. “Perfect shot!”

Macy went over to where Penny had engrossed herself deep in a pile of poetry books.  After a solid ten seconds of saying her name, Macy got her attention and asked her for a recommendation.  For some reason, Marceline wasn’t happy with the initial suggestion of a Marshall Marhojkinz anthology, so instead Penny recommended a short story collection compiled by Turtle Princess herself, which Penny hadn’t taken off the shelf because she already had it back in Jugland.  At the front desk, Marceline checked out that, as well as the Marhojkinz anthology for Penny, and they left the library in Turtle Princess’s good graces.

As they were leaving, Macy turned to face Marceline, stuffing her hands in her pockets because she had shoved her gloves into her backpack and was feeling too lazy to dig them out.  “So I take it you’ll be splitting off from us now?” she asked.

Marceline arched an eyebrow and chuckled.  “What, are you kidding? Of course not. In fact, I was going to have to track you down anyway.  You’re holding onto my toilet paper, remember?”

Penny took out the book she’d just gotten and began reading.  “What’s that about, anyway? Seems like kind of a weird thing to…”  She trailed off, lost in her book.

“Because if I brought it back to Simon’s place,” Marceline explained, taking the banjolele off of her back and plucking at its out-of-tune strings, “he’d know something’s up.  There’s no point pranking somebody if they can see the prank coming ahead of time.”

“Uh-huh.”  Penny nearly walked into a bench, but Macy managed to grab her arm in time and point her in the right direction.  “Whoopsie.”

Marceline dug a small metal disc that resembled a circular harmonica out of her pocket and held it out to Macy.  “Hey, would you mind blowing into this? It’s a tuner.”

“Sure,” said Macy.  She held it out to Penny.  “Hey, would you mind blowing into this?”

“Mhm.”  Penny absentmindedly took the tuner and put it in her mouth, blowing intermittently as she continued walking and reading while Marceline used the sound to tune her banjolele.

“For real, though,” said Macy, a smile spreading across her face.  “Thanks for hanging out with me. I know you ‘don’t have anything else to do’ or whatever, but thanks.  It… it means a lot.”

Marceline smiled back as she strumed a perfectly tuned Cmaj9 chord, brightening the air with its sound.  “You’re a good kid with a cool sword,” she replied. “Besides, I should—” She glanced at Penny, still reading that poetry book absentmindedly.  “I’ll tell you after we drop off Penny pick up the toilet paper.”

* * *

They dropped off Penny and picked up the toilet paper.  Upon seeing Pen, Macy wanted to stay and chat for a bit, but he was in a bit of a grumpy mood.  Apparently, even though he’d bartered the deal down to something more like his liking, he still wasn’t happy with the results, in particular a lack of transparency about why they wanted this deal in the first place.  As a result, he was in no mood to talk to Princess Bubblegum’s wife, friend of his father or no. They left the tenement with the weight of unsaid words added onto the 20 kg of toilet paper.

“So what was it you were going to tell me?” Macy asked in the elevator, knees shaking under the strain.

Marceline sighed as the elevator started moving and its ceiling pushed down on her head.  She reluctantly alighted on the ground. “I don’t know if I should — so, tell me about the day you got adopted.”

“That’s quite the subject change.”

“Yes, it is.”  The elevator chimed as the doors opened; Marceline began plucking on her banjolele in the key of the elevator change as they stepped into the lobby.  “W— your dad told me about the chocolate aviary from his perspective, but I want to know what you remember from it.”

Macy suddenly found herself back in that courtyard, standing by the cocoa tree with that cherry-red eagle glaring down at her, pondering the speckles of fertilizer in the dirt as her friendship with Masse Yvoire fell apart like metal tongs, flame-heated and water-cooled one too many times until they snapped, seemingly without warning.  She could smell the dirt as if she were still there, but she couldn’t remember what color it was. Strange, that.

The snap of cold as she stepped outside did not jar her back to reality.  It was merely added to the scene. She remembered the question Princess Torte had asked her, but she couldn’t remember what the question sounded like.  She remembered a tightening in her chest as thoughts raced through her head, but she couldn’t remember what those thoughts were. She knew what her dad looked like, and she remembered him being there, but she couldn’t remember his appearance.

“I remember being lost,” she said, still back there.  “In every sense of the word. I was directionless and unmoored.  My friend had said something he shouldn’t have, and I said something harsh in response to distance myself from him.  I still need to close that distance, but that’s just another responsibility.” She sighed. She could feel the letter’s phantom weight in her coat pocket, as well as a real weight, small and metallic.  Nonchalantly, she pulled out the purple coin she’d received from Jake that day, the one he didn’t remember giving her. Peering through the hole at the world too dark to see brought her back to reality.

“Oh hey, it’s that thing,” Marceline noted.  “I actually told Bonnie to give out the coins on the same day as the calendar because I knew everyone would be cheesed off by that thing.  Funny story, we have a whole stack of those coins at the castle because they were all thrown at Bonnie once everyone realized how much the new calendar sucked. I threw one, too, just for funsies.”

Macy stuffed the coin back into her pocket.  “Well, I’m not throwing my lucky coin unless I really need to.  The point is, focusing on that coin helped keep me grounded. It was the first time I’d ‘used a tactile sensation to help stymie a dissociative episode’, in the words of my psychologist Dr. Upe.  That plus your daughter giving me a concrete direction, in the form of asking me about the man who is now my dad, helped turn what could have been the most traumatic experience of my life into one of the best things to ever happen to me.”  Then, quieter, “Also she’s pretty.”

“What?”

“I said, that helped turn a traumatic experience into something good.”

“Right,” said Marceline, in a tone that implied,  _ Wrong. _   “Well, for what it’s worth, she asked about you.  She’s been worried about you, since the only time she saw you was when you were at your lowest point, and when she heard through the grapevine that Huntress Wizard had taken you on as an apprentice, she was super glad to hear that you were doing better.  She wants to see you again.”

Macy blushed, nearly dropping the tp.  “I, uh, wow. I don’t know if I’d be ready to, uh.  Wow.”

“Of course,” Marceline continued, “her schedule’s pretty busy for a while, since she’s super into business and stuff, so she’s always doing all kinds of things around the Kingdom.  Right now she’s working with Dirt Beer Guy to get a sodajerk license. If you wanted to come over to see her, that’d be appreciated.”

“I don’t know if I could just go somewhere else and talk to someone there,” said Macy, fully aware that was what she was doing right this literal second.  “How about this: My birthday’s on (oh math where is it in the new calendar again?) the 6th of Abraham. That’s a little over six months away, which is plenty of time to clear her schedule, right?  All you guys are invited. The whole royal family. I mean, I assume you wouldn’t  _ all _ come over, since then there’d be nobody left in Castle Bubblegum, but—”

Marceline patted her on the head.  “It’s a date,” she promised. “Lolly will probably stay behind; personable as she is, she’s not one for socializing.  Anyway, you want to help me throw this toilet paper over Simon’s house and then subsequently the Ice Palace itself?”

“I’d love nothing more.”  She plopped the toilet paper onto the ground as Marceline strummed one final climactic chord on her banjolele.  “Any other revelations you’ve got to lay on me?”

“I’m actually Marshall Marhojkinz.”

“Oh, I get it, like Marshall Lee from the Fionna & Cake stories.”

“Yep.”  The vampire shifted an arm into a bear claw and slashed open the packaging on the toilet paper.  “How’s your throwing arm?”

The nut picked up a roll and smirked.  “It’s my best quality.” Then she threw.

* * *

The next morning, at coward’s sunrise, as Pen was waking up the horse for a long journey back to Jugland and Macy was miles away explaining to a very irate Turtle Princess exactly what the comedic value was in the unwanted streamers hanging off the slopes of her literally mountainous palace, a familiar group of professors was gathered around a table.  While Science Whyzard stood on Gridface Princess’s back to decorate the ceiling with runes, Dr. Gross took out a small whirring gizmo and set it on the table. She pressed a button, and it began spinning and beeping hectically, causing Gridface Princess to nearly fall over.

“Cut out that infernal racket!” cried Professor Worm, covering up his ears with his tail/secondary head.  “The deal’s done, and the Dean isn’t even here today. Is all this paranoia truly necessary?”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Dr. Gross insisted.  “If there’s even a chance there’s an invisible vampire lurking around here again, I at least want to know that this machine can detect her.”

“I can verify that if you turn that bloody device off,” Simon offered, clutching his own ear so hard he felt like he would tear his own ear off.  Dr. Gross obliged with a huff. He stood up, cleared his throat and said, “Rap is lacking as a musical medium.”

Silence.

“She’s not here,” he said, sitting back down.  “I’m sure of it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.  Trust me, she  _ hates _ it when I say stuff like that.”

“Becauseyourewrong,” Prof. Worm coughed.  The worm was right, and he should say it.

“Regardless of how wrong Professor Petrikov is,” said Dr. Gross, “I think we can probably begin at least the first part of the meeting before we’ve completely encased this room in the strongest abjurations known to Ooo.  Armand, you have minutes, yes?”

“Sure.”  He clicked a pen, somehow.

“First of all, for those who weren’t there, the signing went off without a hitch.  We now officially have access to the Jugland mines and a significant fraction of the mineral rights contained therein, contingent on our ability to contribute to their extraction.  And oh, what mineral rights they are! If your analysis of the region’s folkloric literature is accurate, Professor Threadbare, then the veins beneath the Sienna Ridge contain vast deposits of a material nobody else on the planet has access to right now, at least not in significant amounts.”

“And what mineral would that be?” asked Science Whyzard, distractedly putting the finishing touches on a ceiling rune, which was turning out somewhat sloppy as a result.  “You’ve kept us in the dark about it for some weird reason, as if deliberately building up tension for a dramatic reveal.”

“Speaking of dramatic reveals,” interjected Prof. Worm, “before we do that I think it’s time we clear up a dangling thread that was laid bare at our last meeting.”

“What?”

He narrowed his eyes, taking out a tiny flashlight and shining it up at his face somehow.  “Someone in this room is not who they say they are!”

Science Whyzard immediately fell off of Gridface Princess’s shoulders, slamming onto the table before spilling a vial of rune paint into her own eyes.  Howling with pain, she crawled off the table next to Simon, stole his water bottle, and began dousing her eyes with it while he watched in befuddlement.

“I take it you think you know who it is?” asked Gridface Princess.

“I had a suspect in mind, but I didn’t want to reveal myself too soon since all I had were suspicions.  But her actions just now have proved it.”

Science Whyzard dropped the water bottle on the ground, frozen.

“Or should I say, her lack of actions, as if trying to avoid doing anything suspicious by not doing anything at all.  Isn’t that right, Professor Threadbare? Or should I say—” he yanked the mustachioed sock puppet disguise off, revealing another identical sock puppet but with no mustache — “Raggedy Princess!”

“Okay, yes!” admitted Raggedy Princess, frizz-frazzled and hat-haired.  “I forged an identity to become a professor. There are no good universities in the Slime Kingdom’s quarter of the continent, and I figured if a Slime-allied Princess applied for a position at a university headed by the Ice King that would hurt my chances.  That was my reasoning at first, but after that, I just sorta stuck with the ruse out of momentum. I swear, that was the extent of the ruse, though!”

Gridface Princess, realizing that her role as a stepladder would not be resumed, picked up the still-motionless Science Whyzard and placed them in a chair before sitting down in her own.  “Are there any other revelations you’d like to share.”

Raggedy Princess nodded.  “I’m also Lacrima Winterskin.”

“Neat.  Doctor Professor Heidrun Groß, you may resume your dramatic revelation.”

“Good,” said Dr. Gross, hitting a stack of papers on the table to straighten them out.  “As I was saying, there is a rare metal buried beneath Jugland, one which if harvested and studied properly could lead to scientific advances the likes of which haven’t been seen for a millennium.”

Then she said one more word, a word which shocked Simon to his core.  As soon as she said it, he remembered where he had been about a millennium prior, wandering the streets of a broken world with a seven-year-old Marceline — then not even a vampire, let alone a queen.  He remembered having to care for her because there wasn’t another human around who could, let alone would, and he remembered choosing the wrong non-human to take over for him when he felt he couldn’t anymore.  This word sent him back there in a way nothing before had, because he hadn’t thought of it for so long. It was a word that had come to define the twenty-first century, and it always was going to define it, for good or for ill.  And if its destiny were a coin, that coin had landed on the side with a picture of a mushroom cloud.

“Uranium.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sure this will go fine. It's not like Dr. Gross is infamous for poor scientific safety measures leading to deadly mutations or anything.
> 
> Robin's “Hal” nickname for Pen was something I'd forgotten about, then remembered while doing my revision pass. Because of that, it's possible I'll be inconsistent in the next couple chapters, which were drafted before said revision pass. Just a heads up.
> 
> Despite this chapter being relatively bare-bones on its own, mostly serving to establish a relationship between Macy and Marcie (and push forward with the ongoing contract plot), a lot of threads are tugged on and a few are introduced. The Marhojkinz/Winterskin stuff is about as unimportant as you probably guessed, although I'll go back to each of those in the future as the need arises. Turtle Princess and Ice King didn't get a lot of page time, but they're going to play bigger roles later on. This isn't the last we've heard of Tiffany, either, although he wasn't originally going to show up in this chapter.
> 
> Actually, this chapter was originally going to be very different. First of all, it was originally going to be the last part of the 8-parter Flight of Fancy. The whole thing was going to be different, in fact. The deal with Icy U was originally not going to be brought to the forefront until _much_ later in the story, when Dr. Gross's plan was in full force. Pen wasn't going to be there, as Macy hadn't yet returned home. The entire cast, in fact, would have been different. When I restructured the season during planning, some of those people were shifted up to the golf tournament, some were introduced in the chapter that took its place, and a couple were pushed back to later chapters. What this means is there's a minor discrepancy between what I had originally envisioned the cast list being and what it actually is. It doesn't actually matter, since the differences are in minor characters and/or characters whose plotlines don't come into full force until much later. I just thought y'all might want to know. And now you know.
> 
> And now, your preview:  
> “I will sass you into literal oblivion if you don’t leave right now. Don’t think I can’t, too. I studied the forbidden texts of the Sassmasters.”


	14. Spoops and Stairs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A rivalrous prank between Pen and Robin requires the intervention of a spirit specialist, a fact with which Robin is none too pleased.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was one of the earlier story ideas I had when I first came up with the idea for this story. At this stage it's almost redundant to say it, but I'm introducing more minor characters this chapter! What an astonishing change of pace. Nah, but seriously, I really like the characters I made for this chapter. We've got some from canon and some from… something else. If you get the reference, I am so, so sorry. Your discussion prompt for this chapter: What does it mean to do something ironically?

Macadamia the Nut hummed to herself as she lay the salt line up the banister of the curving staircase, an activity rendered precarious by her being on the wrong side of the banister at the time.  She imagined herself climbing the bough of some great tree in the Evil Forest, as she simultaneously learned its secrets and protected its denizens, under the watchful eye and guiding hand of Huntress Wizard.  In that context, the sheer drop below her was not a mildly disconcerting plummet onto a hard wooden floor but a vision of the forest she was securing by the laying of this salt line. The salt itself might have served not to cordon off evil spirits but to keep zombified signs at bay.

Idly, she wondered if that would actually work.  In one of her letters to Huntress Wizard since then, she’d asked what those signs were, and though the goblin didn’t know, the prevailing belief was that they were in fact being possessed by reckless spirits who had failed to heed their warnings; Robin had asked Charlie in one of their inexplicable dream meetings, and she had concurred.  Macy would have to try that at some point.

Thus distracted, she smacked into the curve of the banister at the end of the staircase just as she completed the salt circle.  Though her thick shell kept it from hurting, the sudden stop jolted her back to her senses, and she began to lose her balance. “Whoops!” she exclaimed, flailing briefly for a grip, before falling backwards into open air.

She couldn’t have fallen more than half a meter before a stretchy foreleg wrapped around her own leg and pulled her back up like a fish at the end of a line.  Robin the rainicorn-dog flung Macy over the banister and onto the floor beside zhir with a thud, then retracted zhir arm. Zhe was compressed to zhir inside height, and zhe had recolored zhir fur to be patterned like a worker’s uniform; zhe had even morphed a hard hat that probably wouldn’t provide anything in the way of actual protection.  “Careful, Macy,” zhe teased.  “I know you’re a tough genus to crack an’ all, but I don’t think you want to test that right just here but yet.”

“Speaking of testing,” intoned Vesper, clearing their throat.  Macy turned around and scooted back, watching as her white-robed cousin spread their arms, breathed in, and then retrieved a phone from the inside of their robe’s pocket.  “Languishing spirit,” they commanded, in that awkward, inconsistently flat tone characteristic of someone reading something out loud for the first time and not knowing in advance what inflections to use until it was already too late.  “I invoke the ancient dominion of Death to make your presence known. If you do not appear, your impudent soul will be cast back into the dead worlds whence you came, for escape is futile. That is your crossroad; now cross.”

“Cool spell,” said a stocky blue ghost with a bob cut who suddenly made herself visible in front of Vesper.  “Where’d you get it, the cool spell store for dweebs who can’t come up with any spells on their own?”

“Actually, I got it off the hypernet from starsplashzone717, who—”

“Haw haw, that’s a good one, Shortbelle,” a lanky red ghost with a mohawk called from the parallel stairs on the other end of the Jugland castle lobby, on which this ritual had been performed shortly prior.  “You’ve really got this city kid’s number. Ain’t nobody what can get the better of us on these here stairs.”

“—formerly known as The Dark One,” Vesper stammered, “at least acc—”

Shortbelle (apparently) wiped a lock of hair out of her face.  “Thank you for noticing, Jawffee,” she said in a suave voice. “It seems that some people still know how to talk to a lady, without commanding them to ‘reveal themself’ and ‘stop harassing me.’  Honestly, the gall!”

_ “Enough!” _   Vesper’s robes fluttered up with the sheer force of their shout, and the two poltergeists’ attensions snapped back to them.  Tabbing over on their phone, their walked to the middle of the upper level of the foyer, equidistant from the two stairways, and began reciting.  “Sedieb hci tat osla, Edersträwkcür redo nehcerps Ehcarpsdmerf enie run thcin etllow hci!”

As they recited, they raised their free hand, and the shadows of the banister rose to match, morphing into first tentacles and then chains that bound the two ghosts to the walls.  They attempted to struggle against it, but streaks of light shot up from the salt boundaries, halting their momentum. Amid haunting wails they were dragged out of sight.

“That should do it,” Vesper huffed as they lowered their hands, “but first we should test it, since I’ve never actually—”

“Finally!” exclaimed Robin, stepping forward.  “I can’t wait to be a piece of dreck all day and walk down these stairs.”  Vesper considered trying to stop zhir, but they were tired of being interrupted.

No sooner had Robin planted two paws on the top stair than the whole staircase instantaneously smoothed out into a slide, which zhe began tumbling down cartoonishly fast.  By the time zhe reached the bottom, zhe had — entirely accidentally — transformed into a pastel-striped wheel, rolling to a stop on zhir side like a coin that had been spinning on a table.

Shortbelle reappeared on the stairwell as it went back to normal; a second later, Jawffee reappeared as well, both cackling madly.  They stopped simultaneously and looked at Vesper. “Nice try, dweeb,” they said in unison.

Vesper turned around to face Macy, putting a hand to their head and slumping to the floor.  “I don’t understand why that didn’t work,” they said. “I followed the instructions to the letter.”

Macy glanced at the stairwell she’d just salted, and a thought occurred to her.  “Were those instructions specifically about  _ stairwells?” _

“No.”

“The stairs broke up the salt line.  I bet the ghosts were never really trapped.”

“The dark web has failed me!” Vesper wailed dramatically at the ceiling.  Then they shrugged, put their phone back in their robe, and walked away. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

Macy shook her head.   _ I can’t get a read on that guy. _   Cautiously, she tiptoed down the stairwell, waving nervously at Shortbelle as she passed.  In response, she and Jawffee turned invisible once more.  _ Them either. _

“Well, that was a dud,” moaned Robin, resuming zhir full nine-meter length.  “Those ghosts really goosed my groove.”

“This is certainly quite the magpie’s nest,” Macy agreed.  “But why do you care so much, anyway? Just stop using those stairs and they’ll probably get bored and leave.  Aren’t there, like, four other staircases plus my bedroom window which you still refuse to stop climbing in through?”

“It’s the principle of the thing.”

Macy skilted.  “What principle?”

Robin put a paw on Macy’s shoulder, gazed into her eyes with zhir ruby peepers, leaned in close to her ear slit, and whispered, “Winning.”

Macy let out a resigned sigh.  Robin had been like this for the past two and a half months.  Ever since they’d gotten back from the Ice Kingdom, the dynamic between Robin and Pen had shifted from passive animosity to active antagonism.  Sometimes this took the form of sniping at each other across the dinner table, fighting over Macy’s free time, or doing little things to designed to mildly inconvenience each other like taking the last mashed potatoes, but it usually involved pranks like this.  Just last week, Robin had snuck into Pen’s room and changed the color of his keys to match his desk so he though they were missing. Everyone had known it would only be a matter of time before the spirits of the dead got involved.

“Look, Robin,” sighed Macy, “they’ve been here for, what, two or three days now?  Glob knows how Pen roped them into haunting these stairs specifically to prank you, but you  _ keep trying to use them _ and at this point it’s clear they’re sticking around specifically because they enjoy getting a rise out of you.  You insist on beating him on his own terms and solving a supernatural problem through supernatural means? Fine. Then hire an  _ actual _ exorcist.”

Robin curled into a pyramid and pouted, zhir jowls flapping wildly.  “I don’t wanna!”

Macy skilted.  “Again with that weird insistence.  Why do you—” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.  It’s the middle of the week, and I don’t have time to deal with you when you’re like this.  Here’s the deal: If you don’t hire an exorcist by Saturfriday, then I’ll ask Pen to do it.”

“But then he’ll win!” Robin whined.  A beat. “Oh. Yeah, fine, alright, I’ll call someone up.  I know a guy.”

Macy gave zhir a thumbs-up.  “Cool. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to Bran Don’s place.  The archery club is throwing him a surprise party.”

As soon as Macy left, Robin felt a tightness in zhir chest.  Why did zhe say that? Of course zhe didn’t know a guy. Zhe didn’t know  _ anybody. _   Zhe raced up the stairs, momentarily forgetting about the ghosts; Jawffee turned them into a slide and zhe rolled back down to the bottom.  Growling with annoyance, zhe began plodding down the hallway to find a non-haunted stairwell to ascend. Perhaps once zhe reached zhir prismgram crystal, zhe would know who to contact.  Maybe zhe could ask Charlie for help; she was pretty spooky. Possibly one of Macy’s many books would hold an answer. Whatever the case, zhe had the feeling Macy’s room was the place to be.

When zhe got to the room, zhe paused in the doorway for twelve solid seconds.  “Nope, no ideas,” zhe said, and was about to leave, but then zhe realized zhe had no ideas for what else to do either, so zhe slinked into the room and shut the door.  Zhe closed her eyes, sat down, and meditated, zhir stripes blurring into a gradient, to see if Charlie was in the local dreamscape. No luck — though there were quite a few colorful and exotic spirits floating around the room, zhir great-aunt was not among them.

Finally zhe opened her eyes and fell back on her last resort: reading.  Zhe picked out a random book and started flipping through it, hoping something in this boring mass of symbols would spark some ideas.  Ugh, this one was a  _ pop history _ book.  They always got stuff wrong.  One of them had even called poppoppop “Jack”.  Zhe scanned the pages as zhe leafed through, hoping for anything that could possibly help, and was about to put it back in frustration when zhe stumbled across a mention of spirits.

Zhe backed up a page.  “Blah blah blah… fought against evil… the treachery of The Dark One… yadda yadda yadda… ah, a name I can look up.  Let’s see, Francis Peabody.” Zhe slotted the book on the shelf and pulled out another, a directory of prismgram numbers for various professionals called the 자수정 주소성명록.  Really, this is what zhe should have done from the beginning, but hindsight (unlike zhir eyesight) was 20/20.

“Well, of  _ course _ they got the name wrong.  Franz Peerenboom, AKA… ah, here’s a number.  Let’s try him.”

* * *

Peace Master had been in the middle of tutoring his granddaughter in a math lesson he himself barely understood when the message beamed straight into his temple, compounding his migraine.  Since Threesdays were his days off, he had offered to tutor the literally-accursed elephant-headed child on those days while her mother (his daughter) worked double shifts at the skyport in the Nut Kingdom capital, loading and unloading boxes.  When she and her husband had moved out to the country with him, he’d been glad for the company, but sometimes he wondered if she just wanted him to be convenient for exactly this reason. Whatever; maybe this  _ new _ generation would be more dedicated to the cause of holy, righteous justice.

He rubbed his flat, aching head — the half that wasn’t covered in bandages he was cursed to never remove, that is.  His granddaughter didn’t seem to notice. With that elephantine intelligence, she seemed to only need him as a sounding board rather than a tutor anyway.  He stepped away and over to the nearby cabinet to retrieve an aspirin and a parchment.

He swallowed the aspirin and concentrated on the prismgram he had just received.  He rarely took calls this way, so it took him a moment to remember the mental steps required.  Someone in the Duchy of Nuts needed help dispelling mischievous spirits. Typically he dealt with “evil” rather than “mischievous”, but any spirit trapped on the material plane was a disruption of the cosmic balance of Life, Death, and Decay anyway, so this was well within his purview.

He wrote his reply and stuffed it into his pocket.  He would send the prismgram tomorrow, then leave the day after that from the Shrine of Patroclus in the Nut Kingdom.  That was a holy place with a connection to the Duchy of Nuts, so appeasing the spirits there could only help him. Whether or not the rumors were true that it was mystically linked with a shrine in the Duchy of Nuts, he wanted all the aid he could get if he was to venture into territory even remotely overseen by Princess Bubblegum and her vampiric wife.  He wasn’t monsterist or anything; he just worried that she might act out on her vampiric instincts.

That was actually pretty monsterist of him.  I’m just saying.

* * *

Penelope Farthing climbed out of a flimsy cardboard box in the dark tunnel underneath Jugland.  She held out a concave mirror to look around a corner and down a long tunnel, where she saw two guards talking with each other as they changed shifts.   _ Right on schedule. _   She didn’t know who her human cyborg assistant Izak had tapped to get the guard schedules, but he’d done it, the mad lad.  This would be a cinch, and much less convoluted than that failure of a plan six months ago.

One of the guards turned to head down the hallway she was peering down, so she retreated back into her box.  She waited until his footprints went past and faded into the distance before she even bothered to peek out again.  She peered down with her mirror once more, and as she suspected, the new guard was looking around absentmindedly. Apparently, they were one of the new hires who had been transferred to this posting after some of the more experienced guards were shifted into the recently-reactivated mines.  All the better for her to sneak past.

When the guard was looking the other way, she picked up her box and began creeping up the hallway.  Although her target, the Eye of Perseus, was technically in a publically-accessible place, she’d need to stick to maintenance-only hallways like this if she wanted to avoid getting caught.  There were too many eyes on the public paths, and her luscious red hair was too recognizable and stunning. Her beauty truly was a curse. Unfortunately, all of this together meant that she couldn’t stop to rest anywhere longer than absolutely necessary — Izak could only loop the security camera feeds for so long before someone noticed — and she couldn’t be spotted by anyone.

The guard turned around again, and she quickly ducked into her cardboard box.  Ah, Boxy. This boxy had served her well on more occasions than she could recall.  A good cardboard box was better than any crowbar for an ingenious thief. Boxes could be used to hide from guards, hold things, hide from civilians, reach high places, hide from paparazzi…

Someone she couldn’t see asked the guard a question, and he turned around to address them.   _ Now’s my chance. _   She sprinted forward and raced up to the edge of the room where the large, perfectly-cut emerald was stored.  It was once one of two emeralds set into the eye of a statue of some war hero, but both the statue and the other eye had vanished over the centuries.  A tiny part of her regretted that she was about to complete that tragedy. The rest of her stepped on that part of her’s face and told it to shut its mouth unless it wanted to taste foot.

OK, good, the guy the guard was talking to seemed distressed; she’d probably have just enough time.  She stepped out and—

“Hey, you!” shouted Peace Master, looking past the guard he had been having a very frustrating conversation with and at her.  “Excuse me, ma’am, could  _ you _ please tell me how to get up to the surface of the duchy?  This man insists that’s a ‘state secret’ or some such malarkey.”

Penelope froze.  The guard turned to look at her, then freaked out and blew a whistle around his neck.  Down the hall she’d just come from, she could faintly here the echoing of a half-dozen boots.   _ Aw, sassafras. _

* * *

Macy crossed her arms, looking disappointedly at Robin as zhe climbed in through the window against a darkening sky.  “Am I correct in assuming you didn’t actually call an exorcist?” she questioned, tapping her foot.

“You aren’t, actually,” Robin assured her as zhe slithered onto the desk and shut the window behind zhir.  “I totally did that, which means that not only did I win, I’m cleaning up Pen’s mess.”

“It’s not ‘his’ mess; this is part of a series of escalation you actively encouraged.”

“That’s ridiculous.  Why would I ever want something like that?”  Zhir mouth formed a question-mark shape as zhe tilted zhir head.  It always freaked people out when zhe did this, and in particular Pen.  Zhe assumed they were jealous.

Macy was so used to it that she didn’t even notice.  “Look, since you’ll never come out and say it, I will.  Everybody knows the two of you are hate-dating or whatever.  I don’t care about that. What I care about is that it’s Saturfriday and there’s no exorcist, even though you said there would be, so now  _ I _ need to clean up this mess because even though you’re the adult I need to be the responsible one.”

In a titanic show of restraint, Robin held zhirself back from saying,  _ Isn’t that what you wanted when you became a pro-body? _   Instead, zhe pulled out a letter from a skin-pocket and handed it to Macy.  “I did. I transcribed the prismgram they sent on Slimeday. They must have gotten held up or something.”

Macy took the letter and scanned the page, hemming and hawing to herself.  Finally she folded it up and handed it back. “I can’t read Korean,” she said.  “Could you translate it for me?”

“Nah.”  Zhe turned away.  “Do you believe me or not?”

Macy sighed, then pulled out the desk chair and sat down.  Zhe tapped Robin’s shoulder, making zhir turn back to her, and looked up into zhir eyes.  “Of course I believe you,” she said soothingly. “You’re my friend, and we’re past the point where you’d lie because it’s convenient.”  A beat. “Okay, you’d totally do that, but I believe you in this instance.”

Robin’s horn flared up with color and indignation, but then it sizzled out in resignation.  “I guess that’s fair.”

“That said,” Macy continued, “you’ve been weird about this whole thing.  You say you got this yesterday, but you didn’t tell me then. The only time you hide— the only time you  _ successfully _ hide stuff like this from me is when it’s to do with your past.  Robin, is there something you’d like to tell me?”

Robin stared into Macy’s eyes, and Macy stared back.  Each could see the other’s face reflected, quivering with anticipation.  Seconds dragged like a spatula through fudge, making merest moments feel like years.  Thoughts Robin had forgotten about bubbled to the surface, and words slowly precipitated into her brain, preparing themselves to be said.

Zhe took a deep, preparatory breath.  “I—”

A messenger knocked on Macy’s door, interrupting Robin.  Macy sighed, walked over, and opened the door, disgruntled that her friend’s probably-going-to-be-slag confessional was cut short.

“Excuse me, Macadamia,” said the messenger.  “I hate to interrupt, but there’s someone at the door who says they’re here on account of your friend.”

Macy looked at Robin, shooting zhir a  _ we’ll talk about this later _ look, then back at the messenger.  “Thank you, Ziti,” she said. “We’ll be down to meet them in the main hall; in the meantime, could you collect Vesper?”

“Probably not.”

“Archie, then.  She’s the closest to them.  It’s time we get this ghost problem sorted.”

* * *

Peace Master stood in between the stairs, looking between them as if appraising which of two log bridges is probably less filled with ants.  A silver cross hung around his neck, a symbol of some ancient religion. “I can definitely feel two powerful presences,” he appraised. “Not as monstrous as many a foe I’ve faced, but plenty tenacious in their own right.  You made a good call in hiring me; these spirits are probably ancient.” He turned to look at Archie, lifting a swiss army knife of a monocle away from his one unbandaged eye. “Tell me again what this ‘Vesper’ was able to determine?  I must know all I can before I start, for a single misguided step by a righteous foot is a victory for evil.”

_ “Ein fehlgeleiteter Schritt an einem gerechten Fuß ist ein Sieg für das Böse,” _ repeated Robin, who had adopted zhir indoor form this time.  “From  _ Die Zuckersprichwörter, _ the poem that serves as the Candy Kingdom’s motto.”

“Wait, that’s where it’s from?” PM sounded genuinely shocked.  “I always thought I made it up.”

“Nah, man.”

Archie cleared her throat.  “From what they told me,” she said, “the ghosts weren’t summoned directly to the castle.  That much makes sense, considering my eldest brother isn’t known for his magical ability. They appear to both revel in and draw power from mischief, and Vesper thinks they may have unimaginable power in that regard, but so far that’s only manifested as turning the stairs into a ramp when Robin — and only Robin — attempts to walk up or down them.”

“Hm.”  The exorcist flipped his monocle back on and began rotating through lenses.  “Ah, there they — oh, that’s a rude gesture. Well, they don’t appear to be trapped, barring a bit of leftover salt, which means they’re not actually bound to these stairs by anything except a level of remarkable patience that only the dead seem capable of achieving.  I think it’s likely they were simply paid in some way to come here, so if we cut off that payment supply the problem should solve itself.”

Macy shook her head.  “No, we actually already know who’s responsible, and he wouldn’t be dedicated enough to this bit to maintain any sort of payment schedule.  If these ghosts were compensated, it was up front.”

“Which means there’s no payments to cut off,” Peace Master finished.  “Well, that’s disappointing. Here I was hoping this was going to be easy.  I may have to do a full calling of the dead.”

“Gee,” Robin mocked, “I’d hate if the  _ exorcist _ I hired had to  _ call the dead. _   That’d be really disappointed.”

PM glared at Robin through his monocle.  “Don’t act like you know my vocation better than I do,” he growled.  “The calling of the dead is a powerful ritual designed to banish lingering spirits from low-level to high-level dead worlds, a process which has as much potential to disrupt the balance between Life and Death as any act of necromancy.  It’s normally reserved for particularly malicious or dangerous ghosts; pranksters and poltergeists should not be subjected to it as a mere matter of first resort. I’m only even considering it because I believe that you people have tried everything else already.  Do you understand?”

Robin wrinkled zhir nose but nodded.  “Yes, sir, mister exorcist sir. Far be it from me, a mere  _ one-quarter spirit, _ to pretend to know more about dealing with spirits than someone who makes their job out of  _ fighting _ them.”

The exorcist balked, momentarily at a loss for words.  Then he stamped over to Robin and crouched down to be on her visual level.  “My job is to fight  _ back _ against spirits when it’s  _ necessary,” _ he hissed, “and I was trained by the spirits themselves to do so.  You hired me because you believed my services would be required, yes?  If you can’t find the humility to trust my judgement, then you’re within your rights to end the contract right now.”

A beat; Robin turned away.  “Whatever,” zhe said, walking away.  “Make your determinations without me; I can tell I’m only aggravating you.  Spare me the details, and tell me when you’re done.”

Once Robin had had the door guard close the castle’s front gate behind zhir and leave zhir out of sight, Macy looked at Peace Master apologetically.  “Sorry about the way Robin’s been acting. I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but this is clearly affecting zhir. I’d go with zhir if I thought zhe’d be willing to talk.  For now we should probably do what zhe said.”

“Yes,” PM agreed.  “I wish I could speak more directly to this cousin of yours; they seem  oddly well-connected. Internet tutorials notwithstanding, to be able to invoke the ancient dominion of Death and to acquire such high-quality salt both require not-insubstantial levels of dedication.”

“Oh, yeah,” Archie agreed, “Vesper’s super dedicated.  Except not really. They’ve been into all that mystical dreck for eons, but they keep cycling mystical traditions like they’re seasonal fashions.  They’ll research whatever kind of dark cult they can get their ominous little hands on, and they’ll go full fanatic too, but they never commit.”

“Dark cult?”  The exorcist snapped upright.  Macy and Archie could hear his bones crack uncomfortably, and they winced.

“Yeah,” said Archie.  “But only a little. Don’t be too judgy, dude, there’s no harm in a little tampering with the fabric of reality.”

“That’s right!” Macy agreed.  She ordinarily wouldn’t have endorsed this sentiment, but it was Archie saying it, so she must be right.  “Cultists are people, too!”

Peace Master grunted and lowered his wide-brimmed back hat.  “Cultists are people who mess with forces beyond their ken for a promise of personal power,” he replied.  “True or false, it is the selfishness of that promise that defines their darkness. I’ve seen people do terrible things because they were promised petty prizes.  My own family… my own children’s bodies were twisted by dark magic just because someone wanted to hurt me personally. There is not one good reason to walk down that path.”

Archie shrugged.  “I’ll talk to Vesper about it.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.  While you’re at it, see what else you can find out about these poltergeists.”

“You could just ask,” said Shortbelle, suddenly appearing on the left stairs.

“Yeah, there’s no need fer y’all to talk ‘bout us like we’s not in the same gosh darn room!” exclaimed Jawffee, spontaneously manifesting on the right stairs.

PM straightened out his shirt shoulders and sauntered over to the left set of stairs.  “If you’re offering, then I suppose it only makes sense toAUGH!”

As he moved to the first step, a bolt of blue light reminiscent of the ghostly walls cast by the salt, and he was sent flying back.  Archie caught him and pushed him back upright, whereupon he stamped out a bit of spectral fire on his boot. The ghosts chortled, a creaky, nasally sound, then stared at the trio with fire in their eyes.

They spoke in unison with more voices than two.  “Consider that your final warning, meddlers. These ascension apparati are under our control.”  And then, as quickly as they arrived, they were gone, without the merest trace that they had ever been there in the first place.

Archie gave the exorcist a solid once-over to look for any burns or bruises, then folded her arms.  “Alright, brainiac.  What’s your next move?”

“I’ll be doing some investigation, using this.”  He removed from his bag of tricks a device that looked like a ham radio with a pickle taped to the front.

“What is it?” Macy asked in awe.

“It’s a ham radio with a pickle taped to the front,” he explained.  “A clever contraption from an old comrade by the name of Kenneth. It’s a compact, eco-friendly dimension disruptor.”

“What’s it do?” Archie asked in nonchalance.

“It disrupts dimensions.  When ghosts disappear from the physical plane, they usually hide in an unleveled dead world outside the purview of Decay and vis Reapers.  I can probe for breaches and then use this to follow them into their domain.”

Macy tugged at his sleeved, and when he looked at her, she steeled her gaze.  “Listen well,” she intoned. “I may be a kid, but I know a thing or two about beings of great power.  ‘Their own domain’ is the last place you want to confront such a being. You would be subject to their rules and concourses, and if those rules aren’t also your own—”

She stopped when she noticed his smile, and he answered her hidden question by removing a small pouch from his cloak.  “I am as much a creature of the spiritual realm as any you’ll meet. I am the purifying light of Life; their hideout is my domain.  I didn’t spend the last three decades gathering up relics of holy power for nothing.”

This answer didn’t fully put Macy’s mind at ease, but she smiled back regardless and stepped away with a bow.  “As you were,  _ an Ridere _ Peace Master.  I would still caution you against doing anything tonight; wait for Archie to get back to you.  In the meanwhile I shall make arrangements for Lisby to set you up in a guest room.”

But as she walked away, the sounds of Archie and PM’s continued discussion fading into the background, Lisby was not at the forefront of her mind.  Sweetbelle & Jawffee had just exhibited a display of force unlike any prior. That fact seemed significant, thought she couldn’t fathom why. Something felt off; whether it was the instincts of a huntress-in-training or simply that general sense of foreshadowing that the young and naïve are allowed to understand so innately, she knew in her nut heart that things would not be as simple as the exorcist had asserted.  This had to tie back to Robin in some way. One way or another, zhe’d need to talk.

* * *

“Talk,” suggested Helix.

Robin stared down at the cream soda dregs in zhir mug.  Carbonation bubbles made it impossible to make out zhir own reflection, so zhe projected one there with zhir horn — forlorn, confused, and utterly crunked.  Zhe’d hoped to meet up with one of the other regulars, maybe trade a few words with Cash Daniels or snag some alone time with Jeff the Karuka, but neither of them were here.  It was a slow day in general, which was unusual for a Saturfriday, and the people who were here were all  _ new _ people, whom Robin had no intention of meeting.

Well, there was one non-new person, so zhe might as well talk to them, even though zhe was pretty sure they didn’t like zhir on account of zhe skipped out on zhir tab half the time.  “I don’t know,” sighed Robin, slumping and melting into a puddle on the counter. “I’m just kinda fed up with needing to interrogate my reactions all the time, you know? My feelings are my feelings, whether or not there’s some underlying complex.  If I want to be irrationally angry at an exorcist, let me be irrationally angry at an exorcist.”

Helix wiped Robin onto zhir chair with a soggy cloth.  “Your feelings are valid,” they agreed, “but so are those of the people around you.  If you make yourself unpleasant to be around, no matter how understandable your motivations, people won’t want to be around you.”

“It’s not that.”  Zhe popped back into zhir normal inside form and chugged the rest of zhir soda.  “I just don’t want to be around people. Or rather, I want to be around one specific person, but  _ she _ is going to want me to open up about why I’m feeling this way, probably as a trap to trick me into admitting that I need to apologize.”

“Is there something you need to apologize for?”  There was no judgement in Helix’s voice; they didn’t even seem particularly focused on this conversation as they continued to wipe down the bar.

“Not you, too, green-knight.”  A beat. “Maybe. Probably. I’m never really sure about that kind of thing.  Macy always makes me feel sure, but…”

“…but you don’t want to rely on her too heavily,” Helix finished as he finished cleaning.  “Because she doesn’t rely on you the way she used to, and you don’t want to feel pathetic.”

“Hey!” Robin barked.  “Stop reading my mind.”

“I didn’t.  I’ve just been tending this bar for a long time.  You learn a thing or two about problems.” They pointed as zhir empty mug with one of their leaves while they scooped up empty mugs with the other two.  “Now, would you like a refill on that?”

“No.  I need to jog this off and then get some sleep.  I’m gonna need all the mental energy I can muster if I’m going to work this out on my own, and I think I retroactively already knew that’s what I needed to do.”  Zhe slithered off the stool and waved to Helix. “Thanks for the pep talk, as well as for the beverages!”

“Wait, you can’t—!”  But Robin had already closed the door behind zhirself before Helix could get the rest of their sentence out.  They sighed and faceleafed. “That mutt’s gonna run me out of business.”

* * *

Peace Master, now at the top of the balcony and holding a single candle which illuminated the entire foyer, sighed and leaned against the part of the railing across which he had thrown a grappling hook.  He didn’t remember exactly when he had acquired this device, but it had come in handy more times than it probably should have, and he heartily recommended anyone involved in any dangerous or combat-heavy profession to acquire one.  Well, except perhaps those who could float, fly, or otherwise do what a grappling hook did under their own power. For everyone else, though, they were an indispensable tool, if one needed to, say, bypass an irritable flight of stairs.  When this was over, he would have to thank those ghosts for limiting their sphere of influence to their respective stairways. That was considerate of them.

After taking a moment to catch his breath, he blew out the candle and plunged the foyer into darkness.  In the same instant he lowered his monocle over his eye. Through its blessed lenses swirling shapes emerged in the darkness — countless hordes of those minor spirits inhabiting every corner of every world, a veritable menagerie as sublime as it was grotesque.  To describe them would be an injustice, so I won’t. Just imagine it’s really weird. Weirder. A little weirder. Wait, dial it back a bit. Bingo.

He looked to the left and right.  Shortbelle and Jawffee were completely visible to him now, although they didn’t seem to be aware of this fact.  He chuckled privately. Those who hide in darkness blind themselves to the light, thinking it useless, and thus are caught unawares when it inevitably proves more powerful.

The ghosts left spectral trails behind them, images of the spaces their beings had haunted moments prior.  By following those trails, PM could trace the outlines of paths torn in space. He switched the settings on his monocle, zooming and enhancing.  Flakes of burned incense clung to these tears. They were the dimensional rips he sought, and now that he could see them, he knew their shape.

He put away his candle and pulled out Kenneth’s dimension disruptor.  By touch, he fiddled with the settings until it was honed in on the exact coordinates of the tears.  From here, it would be the simplest thing to open it up and confront the poltergeists in that space where their true images lay, in order to bind them and send them back to whatever world they belonged in.  He held the device out and fingered the activation switch.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

The exorcist nearly dropped the disruptor as that voice spoke, coming from the darkness much too close to himself.  He swiveled his head to its source and was temporarily blinded by the feedback from his monocle. The shadows shone dark and strong there, illuminated by a long white robe.  He pushed the monocle up, covering his eye with his hand. “I take it you are the infamous Vesper. Would you mind telling me where on Ooo did you come from?”

“The darkness,” they replied, pretending that constituted an answer.  “And yes, I am they. I heard you had some unkind things to say about those of my ilk, but fear not.  In truth, I belong to no cult but the cult of knowledge. If my allegiances seem questionable, it is because I am always questioning; if I seem fickle, it is because no answer is complete.  I am no pathetic power-seeker, nor do I stumble about without a clue. I would never be so foolish as to extinguish the flame of reason in the pursuit of anything.”

“Do you mock me?  Because if so, I’m honestly impressed that you came up with that on the spot; it shows an admirable sharpness of wit.”

“Thank you, I do try.  Anyway, you’re making a mistake.  Do not use that device now. Macy asked you to wait until morning.  I would do so; she is wise beyond her years, and when she shows patience it is to be heeded.”

_ When, eh? _   “You’re just positively full of sass, aren’t you?”

Vesper scowled so hard Peace Master could see it through the impenetrable veil of darkness.  “I will sass you into literal oblivion if you don’t leave right now. Don’t think I can’t, too.  I studied the forbidden lore of the Sassmasters.”

PM stowed the disruptor.  “Nice try, but Archie taught me how to deal with you.”  He cleared his throat.  “Seven.”

With a scream, Vesper threw their hands up in the air, pushing the exorcist over and running out of the room.  Peace Master flailed and grabbed onto the rope of his grappling hook, giving himself rope burn but landing without much more injury.  Rubbing his aching posterior, he walked across the room and had the usher let him out of the main hall.

Shorbelle & Jawffee appeared, looking disgruntled.  Shortbelle eyed the abandoned grappling hook like it was a particularly unpleasant painting hanging over her roof at a restaurant.  “I’m glad he’s gone, but he could at least have taken his junk with him.”

Jawffee leaned over his railing and beckoned toward the grappling hook.  “I reckon if’n he left it here, that makes it ours.” As if of its own volition, it drifted toward him; when it reached him, he touched it, and it disappeared in a flash.

Shortbelle shuddered.  “You’d better do something really funny with that later, or else I’m gonna be pissed.”

Jawffee winked, and as he did so, the two ghosts vanished.  There was nobody to witness them vanishing, but if there were, they might have described it as being a three-dimensional version of a crappy wipe transition from a video editing software that came free with an outdated computer from before the 21st century.

* * *

Macy awoke the next morning from restful sleep.  She stretched her arms and yawned as golden sunlight poured in from the window, coaxing her into wakefulness.  She allowed herself exactly seventeen seconds of toasty warmth before she threw off the covers and slid onto the floor.  She went into the bathroom to brush her teeth, wash her face, and buff her shell, after which she felt invigorated with that unique energy that comes from cleanliness.  She threw open her closet door and perused her collection of clothes before deciding on a pink button-up shirt and light jeans — a decent mix of respectable and functional, she thought.  Finally, she threw on her backpack, into which she threw a book of poetry Penny had recommended, her coin for good luck, and the Root Sword, just in case. She went back into the bathroom to check herself out in the mirror.  She looked ready for not just the day but any possible day.

As she came out of the bathroom, she saw Robin climbing in through the window and pulled zhir the rest of the way in; Robin barely managed to hook the window shut with zhir rear paw as zhe was flung unceremoniously onto the ground.  “Come along!” Macy beckoned in a singsong voice as she went out into the hallway. “It’s time for oatmeal.”

Robin grunted as zhe got up and compressed zhirself to zhir indoor size.  “You’re the only person in the history of, like, ever to get excited over oatmeal, you know?”  Zhe followed Macy out the door.

“Oh, that’s ridiculous.”  She waved to Galé as he emerged from his own bedroom in a cap and nightgown.  “Hey, Galé, am I the only person to ever get excited over oatmeal?”

“Ay,  _ déagóir,” _ he nodded.

Macy shrugged.  “That’s everyone else’s loss, I guess.  Anyway, it’s oatmeal time, so I guess we should all head over, together, aye?”  She nudged Galé with a wink; he nodded back sleepily.

Robin kept zhir head low.  “I guess.” Zhe had hoped to get a chance to talk to Macy alone, but zhe feared zhe might not get a chance, and zhe didn’t want to make a scene of pulling zhir aside.  Zhe could probably talk to her right now, but zhe didn’t really know Galé that well, and to be frank, he kind of weirded zhir out. It wasn’t the accent, per se, but the fact that he inexplicably had one in the first place.

The whole family was there for breakfast that morning — Pen, Vesper, even Colla and Penny.  Robin was too pensive to be testy towards Pen, and Vesper wasn’t in a combative mood, so the table conversation was amicable, if a bit uninteresting.  There were no explosive revelations, no heartfelt confessions, no too-harsh barbs. There was only oatmeal, and small talk that had the texture of oatmeal.

When she had slurped the last of her oats, Macy looked up at the skylight above, through which Vesper had absconded when she had first met them.  The sun hadn’t quite crested its ridge, but from the way the shadows fell across, it was threatening to. “I should go make my rounds in the forest,” she announced suddenly, standing up with a scoot of her chair.  “If I don’t practice what Huntress Wizard taught me regularly, I’ll lose it.” As she stretched, she racked her mind for a Jugland-specific expression; over the past seven months, she had tried to make a habit of using them frequently.  She wasn’t sure whether it was because she wanted to sound more like a Juglandite to others or to herself, but at this point it was less a symptom of insecurity and more a force of habit. Finally, she decided upon, “Traversal is nature’s pavement.”

Vesper nodded in agreement.  “That is why the road less traveled is best kept a mystery.”

The Duchess of Nuts folded her arms and furrowed her brow.  “Humbug. You take the road less traveled all the time!”

“Yes, and I failed to exorcise a pair of prankstery poltergeists.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Macy.  She slung her backpack on; Robin got out of zhir seat despite still having half zhir third bowl of oatmeal left, and Lisby the butler serendipitously walked into the room.  “Speaking of which. Lisby, was Peace Master not informed that he could break feast with us this morning?”

“He ate with the other servants and I,” Lisby responded in that voice Macy still could  _ not _ take seriously.

“I’m sorry to hear that.  In fact, I’m a bit sorry that the servants have to eat their meals in a separate facility.”

“Don’t be.  Ours is much nicer.”

Macy wasn’t sure how to feel about that.  “Ate? Past tense? Did he get a head start on the exorcism proper, then?”

“That’s actually why I came over here.”  He suddenly adopted a panicked expression, as if he had only just then remembered he was panicking.  “Something’s gone wrong, and now the ghosts have captured him!”

Macy felt lightheaded.  She was back in the Evil Forest, in a clearing which had previously been filled with holly bushes, clutching the brown cloak of Huntress Wizard.  Someone more experienced than she had gone up against a threat they had specifically prepared for and still been caught unprepared. Now, because she was an  _ idiot, _ Macy was taking it upon herself to help them.  This wasn’t some burden placed upon her by society.  Nobody had forced her to go into the Evil Woods, to stupidly trust Toronto, to ask Huntress Wizard to train her for a job she didn’t want.  She had decided that for herself, and now she had to see it through.

She felt Robin pull her forwards, out of the Evil Forest and her reverie.  Robin, of all people, was leading her through the halls of Castle Jugland and toward this danger.  Despite herself, Macy chuckled. “What, do you actually want to clean up your own mess for once?”

“What?  No!” Robin let go of Macy’s hand, and she stumbled forwards a few paces before finding her feet again.  “I was just dragging you along because of your incessant hero complex.”

“Oh.  I guess that makes sense, too.”  As Macy began running under her own power, she briefly questioned whether she really wanted to get dragged into this.  Then she remembered that she had packed the Root Sword in her backpack. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a hero.”

“Not if you do it right, I suppose,” Robin conceded.  A beat. “Hey, listen, Macy. I think I need to talk to you about why I was so weird about the exorcist.”

“Does it have to be right now?”  Macy skidded and nearly fell at a corner.

“No, but it’s gonna be anyway.”

“That’s fair.”

“Alright.”  Robin gathered zhir thoughts as the pair of them raced through the halls.  What, and how much, could zhe bring zhirself to say? “Okay,” zhe began, “you know how my mom comes from a long line of spiritualists, right?”

“No.”

“Cool.  Anyway, my maternal grammy once summoned a crystal spirit in an attempt to gain more power, and I guess they hit it off pretty well on account of that’s where Mom came from.  So Mom was supposed to get all of these cool powers, but it turned out that, uh. She didn’t, which yanked her whiskers, so she decided to quit the family business. She married my pop, and bippity boppity boo, I was born.”

“Uh-huh.”  Macy drew to a halt at a fork in the hallway, looking first left and then right.  “It’s taking us an awful long time to get to the foyer. Are we going the right way?”

“Probably.”  Robin led her down the path zhe was pretty sure was correct.  “At any way, I obviously don’t remember much of that time, but I do know pop wasn’t around much.  He was too busy doing whatever it is he used to do before he stopped doing it. That left my mom to— He was too busy doing whatever.”

Macy raised an eyebrow at this random restart, but she didn’t say anything.  She didn’t want to test fortune’s mood.

“Anyrate,” Robin continued, “when Pop got canned, Mom picked up the slack as a  _ fake _ psychic, using what she’d learned of the trade from grammy to give herself an air of legitimacy, when all she was really doing was cold reads and parlor tricks.  As I got older I learned that this sort of thing is pretty common in the psychic industry, even for real psychics, because it’s just easier to not have to deal with potentially unreliable ghosts when you want some consistency in yer business model.  Eventually, she… she…” Robin sighed. “She left to do that full-time. For the first six months she sent Pop and I a stipend, and then she didn’t. And that’s why I don’t like spiritualists.” Zhe sounded oddly chipper.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” exclaimed Macy.  She stopped walking and hugged Robin tightly, and the rainicorn-dog didn’t struggle too much.  Then she let go of zhir and put her hands at her nut sides. “Except what you just told me wasn’t the whole truth.”

“Aw, come on!” Robin complained.  “How did you know?”

“I didn’t.”

“Oops.”

“But I figured it wasn’t, because getting it out of you wasn’t like pulling teeth.  Also, the preamble had nothing to do with the actual problem, which suggests you were originally going to say something different — presumably the  _ actual _ reason.”  She sighed and continued walking.  “Oh well. I should have figured something was up when I didn’t need to wrassle hassle the story out of you to begin with, but for now that really should wait.”

“Why’s that?”

She threw open a door before them.  “Because we’re here.”

The foyer was a mess, much more so than seemed reasonable.  On the floor in front of them, halfway to the edge of the balcony, Peace Master’s dimension disrupter lay on the floor, broken and crackling, its pickle missing; next to it was a brown bag out of which spilled various holy symbols.  The railing itself was splintered in three places and looked on the brink of collapse. The stairs were worse; tendrils of energy lashed out from cracks in the walls which oozed pickle-scented mist, shifting the twin stairways from stair to slide and back again as they passed over.

Macy reached into the water-bottle sleeve of her backpack and withdrew the Root Sword.  “Looks like we’ve got a ghost of a problem.”

Robin chortled.  “A ghost of a problem?  Seriously, that’s what you’re going with?”

“I had another one prepared, but I forgot what it was in the heat of the moment, okay?  It’s better than nothing.”

“It most definitely is not, Macy.  It’s much worse than nothing.”

“Listen here you little—”

* * *

Peace Master struggled in vain against the grappling hook chain that had been tied around him like rope as he dangled upside-down.  The chain was affixed to nothing; when he strained his head to look up, it seemed to extend infinitely into the boundaryless fuchsia void.  In the back of his mind there was faint humming. Coming into view as he corkscrewed (he wasn’t sure if he was suspended or freefalling) were Shortbelle and Jawffee, glowing vibrant blue and red respectively, and still bickering.

“I just think y’all’s bein’ a little too picky, s’all,” Jawffee muttered.  “Dunno watcha reckoned. Ain’t like I’ve got much t’work wif. B’sides, y’agree that it’s eye-rah- _ neek. _ ”

“That’s not how it’s pronounced, you flabbergasting flibbertigibbet,” Shortbelle spat back.  “And anyway, ‘ironic’ isn’t the same thing as ‘comedic’.”

“Irony is the root a’ comedy, dontcha knowit?  Subversion a’ yer expectaters. Takin’ the tool a’ the hunter ‘n makin’ it a tool agin’ ‘im.”

Shortbelle shook her head.  “No, the root of comedy is sacrilege.  Taking something which is held in esteem and making it ridiculous.”

“Tha’s just a kinda irony, innit?”

“I’m not saying it isn’t; I’m saying that humor is something more specific than irony rather than something intrinsic.”

Jawffee looked offended.  “Oh, an’ I suppose soccer-ledge is intrinsic, then?  What a hoot!” He slapped his knee sarcastically. “Next y’all be tellin’ me humor’s inher’ntly offensive, huh?”

Shortbelle returned the offended look.  “Now, let’s not get ridiculous; I never said  _ that. _   I only meant—”

The two of them stopped talking.  The humming in PM’s mind had grown louder, and apparently they heard it too.  He ceased struggling when he realized that it wasn’t coming from his mind; it was emanating from infinitely far away in every direction in the fuchsia void.  As it grew louder, it took on character, echoing off creases in the fabric of unreality and causing them to ripple shades of indigo and lavender. He didn’t recognize the song, but he could tell it wasn’t like any typical song.  The notes were spaced differently: more microtonal, more chromatic, randomer. Truth be told, he wasn’t a big fan of that sort of thing, but at least it was better than this interminable discourse.

The sound collected until it was coming from a single source — a particular knot of iridescence that was suddenly visible a few dozen meters away.  Color spread from the knot, forming a magenta path with violet rails, sinding and branching all the way to the ghosts and the exorcist and spreading outwards to infinity like some cosmic periwinkle.  Cautiously, Shortbelle began to float over toward the source, holding up a hand to tell Jawffee to stay by Peace Master.

With a crackle of static, the humming gave out as the fold tore open from the other side.  Through the glowing hole stepped Macy, the Root Sword clasped in her hands glowing with a cold yellow light; Robin followed close behind, zhir fur matching the sword’s color and giving off the same aura.

“What is this place?”  Robin sounded more disgusted than wondrous.  The infinite fuchsia was repulsive to zhir, a confluence of colors which should not have existed, and for some reason zhe could sense it even when zhe wasn’t trying to.  Stranger still, there didn’t seem to be  _ any _ light outside the narrow visual range of the majority of Ooo creatures.  The result was an electromagnetic uncanny valley.

Shortbelle’s eyes widened, appalled at the rainicorn-dog’s tone.  “This is our yurt, you disrespectful butternut squash. I made it myself.”

“That’s why it’s so awful, then.”

“It’s  _ satirical, _ dumbspleen.”

Macy stepped past Robin, walking along that purple path, and held her sword out toward an unflinching Shortbelle.  “You have that man captured,” she said, indicating PM with the sword tip. “Which for?”

“That’s also satyr-sickle,” Jawffee shouted from the distance.

A beat.  “What?” asked Macy, cupping her ear slit with her offhand.

“I said it’s also—”

“What?”

“I been sayin’—”

“What?”

Jawffee sighed and snapped his fingers.  The space between them folded; several of the branching paths snapped like twigs, new ones sprouting in their place.  A bar of purple sailed toward Macy, but she casually bisected it with her sword. One half squashed a misfortunate Robin.  When all this was done, Jawfee was on the other side of Macy from Shortbelle, right between Robin and the Door, and the bound exorcist was floating upright beside him like a balloon wrapped in the chain of a grappling hook.

“‘Cuz we wanna,” Jawfee said.  “‘Cuz he needed ta taste wha’s like t’be banished to ‘s own pocket dime-mention.”

Macy briefly took in Jawffee’s new position before resuming her focus on Shortbelle, who had gotten closer.  “He was within his right,” she said. “The two of you are engaging in a targeted harassment campaign against this disrespectful butternut squash—”

“Hey!” Robin protested as zhe schlorped out from under the crushed purple whatever.

“—and thereby made yourselves antagonists.  In the language of the laws of nature, which I am sworn to uphold, you are invasive.  These haunts are not historical but recent, so that man you have tied up is not the aggressor — you are.”

“Big talk,” drawled Jawffee.  Macy didn’t turn her head, but Robin did, morphing into the shape and color of a cool cat and raising zhir hackles.  “But we was hired t’do this stuff, an’ no aminna balkin’ ‘bout morality shindigs can change that. We’s gots devotion to the craft o’ geistin’, y’all.”

Shortbelle nodded, pumping the air with her fist.  “Preach it, brother!”

Macy sighed.  “Alright then.  Despite appearances, I don’t actually want this to escalate.  If we match whatever you were paid, will you agree to end aggressions?”

“I guess, presuming you’ve got seven hundred dollars of Ice Kingdom tire money.”

“I can acquire it.”  Macy didn’t lower the Root Sword, which Shortbelle eyed nervously.  “Do we have a deal? We give you that, and you release Peace Master and leave?”

“Oh, no no no.”  Shortbelle attempted to approach Macy, but she held up the Root Sword a bit higher and the azure ghost halted in her midair tracks a meter from the nut’s face.  Still, she resumed talking without faltering. “We can’t let him go under any circumstances. That would harm our artistic integrity. Besides which, we’ve yet to do anything funny with the—”

Macy lunged forward before she could finish the sentence.  The golden-glowing blade chopped off a lock of her ghostly hair, which fluttered into the abyss as the other inhabitants of the demiplane stood shocked.  There hung that awkward tension which came when one person took initiative before anyone else was ready.

A beat.

Shortbelle whirled around, enraged.  Her face took on monstrous features — a single tusk, a warthog nose, insectoid eyes.  She glowed with a harsh blue light to match the yellow of the Root Sword and sent a telescoping fist toward Macy.  The nut dodged out of the way and raised the sword to chop it off, but instead it deflected off with a metallic clang.

Macy had no time to process this before Shortbelle closed the distance with a charge, attempting to gore her with her tusk.  Her shell prevented the blow from going through, but Macy was still knocked into the air with a disorienting jolt. Glancing behind her, she grabbed onto the bottom of one of the branching paths that had appeared in the pocket dimension, but when she looked back, Shortbelle was gone.

She heard a snort behind her, and her eyes widened in terror before Shortbelle slammed her out of her perch and onto the path below with a meteoric smash.

Meanwhile, Robin was furiously hacking away at PM’s chains with the handaxe zhe’d gotten from Huntress Wizard, gripped in zhir cool-cat tail glowed with a faint echo of the light of Macy’s Root Sword.  It was slow going, especially because the exorcist (not a fan of having axes swung at him) kept squirming and making Robin miss the chains. All the while zhe kept dodging red lasers Jawffee kept firing from his eyes because apparently that was a thing he could do.

“Could you have done that the whole time?” Robin grunted.

“Yessiree,” replied Jawffee, “but as y’all should know, the key t’good comedy ‘s all ‘bouts timing.”

“You’re not—”  A laser blast hit zhir in the shoulder, and zhe howled in pain.

Finally zhe got in a solid swipe that shattered the chain with a sound like breaking glass.  Peace Master began to fall upwards, but Robin grabbed onto his foot and slammed him onto the ground with definitely way too much force, putting cracks in the cracks in reality.  Zhe then used the momentum to push zhirself forward, latching onto Jawfee with zhir claws and swiping down with zhir handaxe.

Zhe clove him in two, but Jawffee smirked as he was bifurcated, unnerving Robin enough that zhe failed to look in front of zhir.  Zhe sailed through him and then was carried past to a spiral magenta staircase careening into the abyss. As burgundy tendrils pulled Jawffee back together, he snapped his fingers and the staircase turned into a slide, which Robin landed on and began tumbling down.

Jawffee guffawed.  “I warned y’all about them there stairs,” he drawled.  “I told ya, rainicorn-dog.”

Peace Master pushed himself to his feet, his face aching.  His vision swam as he saw the strobing red form of Jawffee taunting over some form of fuchsia slip-n-slide.  He reached over to his belt but found something missing. “My bag!” he gasped. He cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted, “Does someone have my things?”

Macy, pulling herself out of the cracked path through unreality, heard only muffled, indecipherable shouting over the sound of the blood pounding in her shell.  It had only been on instinct that she had hummed the song from the forest as she had sliced the hole in reality open; she hadn’t known to expect these walkways to form, and she wasn’t about to take any chances on how durable they were.  She scrambled away from the cracked segments on all fours just as Shortbelle slammed down onto Macy’s impact crater.

She spared a glance in the direction she’d heard the shouting from and saw that PM had freed himself.  Thinking quickly, she tossed the bag of holy symbols him-ward, then whirled around on one foot with her blade outstretched like it was the hammer from that strength test game at Stupendous Hal’s.

As she knocked the charging Shortbelle aside, she felt a jolt up her arms.  The humming that had been continuing in her head since she entered this dimension stumbled, the glow of the root sword faltered, and for a brief moment she felt the very texture of the amethyst floor beneath her glitch out.  Then she hummed it out loud, staring the monstrous blue ghost dead in the eye, and took a low, wide defensive stance.

Shortbelle looked the nut up and down, looking for an opening in her defenses.  Grunting, she scraped a now-hooflike foot against the mysterious walkway, then charged forward.  Macy attempted to knock her aside with her sword’s aura again, but Shortbelle went in for a taloned suckerpunch, nailing Macy in the eye and sending her toppling over the edge.

Macy jammed the sword into the side of the path; as she fell, it tore through the bottom and then further, extending it downard as she fell.  She twisted around to send her momentum upwards, carrying the sword in an arc so that she traced out an entire loop under the side of the path before vaulting herself into the air above and behind an unsuspecting Shortbelle.  With a scream, she thrust the sword downwards as she fell. Shortbelle bisected in a manner perpendicular to Macy’s sword somehow; by the time Macy landed, the two halves of the ghost were zooming away like ragdolls in a poorly hacked-together physics engine.

She then began running over toward the exorcist, who had gotten out a particularly hefty holy symbol shaped like a pierogi and begun to do some exorcising.  “Let the light of harmony dispel your hatred,” he recited. “Get back to the place where once you belonged. Get back, and return to your true dwelling! Jojokizow!”  His words rang like liquid helium, distilling the air and causing Jawffee’s aura to waver, as if filtered through a glass onion.

Jawffee concentrated for a moment before exploding into three identical ghosts, swirling around Peace Master in an attempt to confuse him.  PM, unfazed, flicked on his monocle and held out his hand toward one of the Jawffees, which was then instantly bound in sudden silver chains.  The other two Jawffees disappeared as that one — the real one — began struggling, suspended in midair.

The exorcist then did a backwards swan dive off the platform, sailing downward like a bolt until he caught up to the wheel that was Robin.  Grabbing onto zhir with both hands, he whispered divine words of power, and two glorious amaranthine wings sprouded from his back with a sound like tearing paper.  He flapped them once, twice, three times, and propelled both him and Robin back up to the pathway.

“Whoa,” said an awestruck Robin.  “How’d you do that?”

Peace Master grunted.  “I told you I’m powerful on the spirit plane,” he said by way of explanation.  “I am a professional, after all.”

“I’m sorry for doubting you.”

“Yes, you are.”

Macy finally reached them; her legs felt like jelly, as if she’d somehow run fifteen sixteenths of a kilometer in the four-and-a-quarter minutes she’d been in this plane.  She looked at Robin, then PM, then the bound Jawffee. “Took care… Shortbelle…” she wheezed. “Should leave… regroup… hopefully that was enough… if not…”

The exorcist nodded in agreement.  “Yes; I’d rather leave before these ghosts figure out I’ve burned through all my prepaid offerings to the globs.”

Macy gave a thumbs-up as she tried to decipher what that sentence meant.  Why would someone pay to offer something to Glob? There was a song stuck in her head that made it difficult to think; she focused on the tactile sensation of the path below her to ground herself.  When that sensation started to feel weird, she remembered suddenly that said song was actually important, so she started to hum it again.

A bolt of red head hit her on the face, interrupting her song.  Jawffee, despite being bound, still had those laser eyes that he could apparently use for some reason.  “Robin, cover me,” Macy grunted; the rainicorn-dog obliged, turning into a parasol. Macy began to hum once more.

Something else hit her in the face — a hand.  Half of Shortbelle appeared behind her, yanking her off her feet and away from Robin, whereupon Jawffee fired at her again.  She feebly raised her sword, which was no longer glowing. The laser reflected off of it onto Jawffee’s chains, shattering them.  Before Peace Master could respond, the other half of Shortbelle flew in from out of nowhere and grabbed  _ him, _ hoisting him into the air.

In a flash, and with a sound like a paper bag flattening, the cracks in reality disappeared, magenta walkways and all.  Macy tried humming once again, but Shortbelle’s clawed hand pressed into her mouth, and she screamed in pain instead. With a spasm, she dropped the root sword into the infinite pinkness, where it would presumably join what remained of PM’s grappling hook.

Shortbelle flew over to herself and reunited, tucking the exorcist and nut under her arms and resuming her normal form.  Jawffee reached over and lazily picked up Robin as zhe slowly drifted nowhere in umbrella form. The two laughed. It was over.

“I am s-sorry,” sputtered Peace Master.  “I should have— I should have—”

“Can it!” yelled Shortbelle, shaking him to shut him up.  “My  _ gawd _ you’re infuriating.  You ruined our pocket dimension!  It’s going to take so many sweeps to flatten out all the wrinkles in space and time until every point is indistinguishable from every other again.”

“Sweeps?”  Macy attempted to skilt, but she ended up just flopping her leg uselessly.  “Like, with a broom?”

“You can it too!”  Shortbelle rattled Macy, and she felt her nut organs jostle around in her shell.  “Stupid mortals, thinking you can come in and invade someone’s space just to harass them.”

“Yeah,” Jawffee agreed.  “We did it first, an’ we did it better.”

Shortbelle nodded.  “Remember that next time, dumbfaces.”

“So that’s it?” Robin piped up, shifting back to full dog form, zhir body trailing far into the depths below like a windsock blowing dramatically with no wind like the hair of a dramatically-posing anime hero standing atop the body of a slain giant like a mountaineer standing atop a cloud-partingly tall mixed simile.  “You’ve kicked our butts to establish your superiority, and now you’ll let us go back to our lives and move on now that you’ve had your fun, presumably never to return.”

Jawffee laughed hysterically for twelve seconds, then looked at Robin and gave a cold, deadpan, “Naw.”

Robin sighed, zhir colors desaturating slightly.  “Worth a shot.”

Shortbelle and Jawffee snapped their fingers, and a swirling red-and-blue vortex appeared above them, exerting a gravitational force on the three mortals.  The vortex looked uncannily smooth and seemed to spin at a low framerate, occasionally lagging and then suddenly moving faster to catch up. Its very existence made everyone around it wish their eyes didn’t exist, for merely gazing upon it made them feel instantly dumber, yet it was also impossible to look away.  Things that existed were not supposed to be this janky. Then again, who was to say anything in this or any realm existed at all?

“Now,” said Shortbelle, laughing as she clenched PM and Macy, “it’s time for you absolute failures to get out of this dimension before you brick any more of our jokes.”

“No!” shouted Macy, suddenly kicking up a fuss and squirming harder than before.  She tried to break out, but her captor was feeling a bit more corporeal than ghosts typically were, perhaps because this was her home plane.  Shortbelle started rattling her again, but she didn’t care. “After all this? We can’t have lost this easily; we can’t go back to how it was forever!  We can’t have failed! I—” She choked out a sob. “I can’t have failed.”

Robin drooped in sadness.  Zhe attempted to melt out of Jawffee’s hands, but zhe was still tense.  The sight of the exorcist kept zhir on edge, and zhe wasn’t sure why. Damn him, though, Macy was crying.  “I’m sorry, Mac,” zhe said. “I really didn’t want this to happen.”

“You!”  Macy managed to get an arm free briefly; before Shortbelle slammed it back to her side by spontaneously growing a prehensile tail, she pointed it accusitarily at Robin.  “You didn’t want this to happen, huh? You mean you didn’t want to  _ try! _   And before you say anything, don’t pretend it’s because you were afraid of this.  I’m smarter than that, and you’re smarter than thinking I’m not.”

Shortbelle narrowed her eyes and nodded toward the waiting portal.  Jawffee shook his head, held up a finger, and mouthed,  _ “Timing.” _   Shortbelle stopped shaking Macy.

“If you wanted, you could stop this right now in a hundred different ways!” Macy continued.  “You could turn on your horn and pull out some illusion magic. You could shapeshift and escape from the grapple.  You could have stopped wrassle-hassling, swallowed your pride, and just talked to your hate-boyfriend about this. But no, you refuse!  And I don’t know if it’s this irrational phobia of spiritualists or something else, because you refuse to explain yourself to me, your closest friend.”

“I’m really, truly sorry,” Robin repeated.  “I don’t want to be a burden.”

Macy gaped.  “Well, you’re being pretty burdensome right now, I daresay!  You self-absorbed prick, are you actually trying to spare my feelings by sparing me yours?  Your feelings were never so heavy that they were the reason I was buckling. I have problems other than you, thank you oh so very much.  My other best friend of over a decade won’t talk to me, I’ve given myself such a reputation at school for spinning tales that I can no longer eat lunch in peace, and oh yeah, every now and then I suffer hallucinatory flashbacks so severe they hinder my ability to distinguish reality from fantasy!  You closing yourself off to protect me from your weird, self-inflicted problems is the antithesis of helpful.”

A beat.

Macy breathed in for five seconds, held her breath for five seconds, breathed out for five seconds.  “So can you talk to me —  _ honestly _  — about why you’ve been acting weird?”

Robin cast one more glance at Peace Master, then closed zhir eyes.  “What I told you earlier was… it contained the truth,” zhe said. “Part of the truth, at the very least.  Grammy really was a spiritualist who bound a Crystal Spirit, and that really is where Mom came from. ‘Hit it off’ is really the wrong word, though; it was more of a  _ quid pro quo _ arrangement.  Grammy gives the spirit access to the Crystal Dimension, releasing it from the vast prism where it had dwelt for thousands of years, and in exchange, it gives her Mom.”

“Who didn’t have any powers,” Macy recalled.

“Not quite.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The powers she got… they were more of the latent variety.  The kind of power that makes other powers more powerful, which isn’t very empowering.  Needless to say, that got Grammy real pissed off, and she always resented Mom, saying she was worthless an’ all that.  Mom was desperate to get back at her in the same way, so she tried to do the same gambit in the opposite direction.”

Macy’s eyes widened as she realized where this was going.  “Do you mean—”

Robin nodded.  “Near as I can tell, the first time she met Pop was when Poppop was investigating her for fraud, on account of she was a fraud.  See, she may not have had any real spiritual powers, but she did have my eyes, which were good enough to convince most people that she  _ did. _   I wasn’t lying when I said that a big part of my distrust of spiritualists came from growing up with a scammer of one.”

“And the other part?”

Robin fell silent.  Zhe looked away, off into the distance.  “I’ve said enough,” zhe said eventually. “I’ve given you more than enough info for you to guess why I’m being so pathetic right now.”

As if to prove zhir point, zhe went even limper, so that Jawffee had to change his grip to stop zhir from falling up into the portal right now.  Nobody else (including Shortbelle) was quite sure  _ why _ he didn’t want zhir to fall into the portal, but if it weren’t for that, zhe definitely would have.  As it was, zhir hind legs were flailing about near it, pressed together like a vicegrip as if Robin had somehow taken all the tension in zhir body and shoved it tailward; zhir tail rattled like a maraca.

Macy growled in frustration.  “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare do this again, you hear me?  I won’t stand for it.”

Shortbelle raised an eyebrow in confusion, looking at Macy like a nut she’d picked up off the street.  “Why? It’s pretty obvious that zhe was—”

“Shut up!” Macy shouted, startling Shortbelle so that she held her at arm’s length.  “You’re not involved in this anymore, but if you’re so interested in this little therapy hour, I could have a whole  _ field day _ with your bizarre entitlement complex.  Who do you think you’re fooling with this?”  She gestured with her arms as if to indicate the entirety of nothing.  “You’re not making a point by camping out in Princess Bubblegum’s Waiting Room For Limbo while you and your boyfriend with the fake accent camp out in the lobby of the castle and repeatedly antagonize one specific person.”

“What in tarnation did y’all say ‘bout my axe-int?” asked Jawffee angrily.  Shortbelle merely stared.

“You’re not clever,” Macy continued, dropping her voice to a stage whisper.  “You’re not righteous, and you’re certainly not haunting. We all know you’re in this for the money and just put in the minimum possible effort because you don’t care.”  She pointed upward. “That portal right there? It’s a dreck portal. And in that vein, if you at all believed you were justified in defending your stakes here, you’d have thrown us out of that portal long ago — as soon as we got here, even.”

Shortbelle narrowed her eyes.  “Maybe I should.” But then she looked past Macy, at Jawffee, and he was shaking his head.  Shortbelle sighed. “Okay, you’ve got me. I’m a hired goof who just wants to do her  _ damn _ job but also doesn’t want to do anything at all.  Happy?”

“Guess.”  Macy turned around to face Robin as Shortbelle stuck her tongue out in a feeble gesture of mocking.  “Back to you.”

Robin folded zhir arms as the rest of zhir body sailed overhead.  “Why do you need me to say it? You clearly have already figured it out, Mac Juggles P.I.”

“Because saying it will help you come to terms with it.”

“And why should I do that when I’ve gotten along just fine dodging it up until now?”

Macy thought about that question for a moment.  Why should zhe?  _ Aha. _   “These ghosts have obviously been hired to cause you discomfort, and nothing seems to cause you more discomfort than talking  _ honestly _ about yourself.  You think you can give them what they want?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No.”

“Please?”

Robin’s teeth started chattering.  “No.”

“Pretty please?”

Robin’s colors started flashing like sirens.  “Nope.”

“Ugly please?”

A beat.

PM cleared his throat.  “What’s ugly—”

“She hated me!” Robin shouted.  Even portal above seemed to calm down in respect at the pain in zhir voice.  “Mom hated me for the same reason Grammy hated her. My heritage was supposed to make me strong, but it didn’t work.  The crystal golem’s gift meant I got  _ all _ of the powers I could have gotten, but each individual power was too weak to be of any use to her.  Not for what she wanted to do. She was too ambitious, and she took all the wrong lessons from her own childhood.  Or maybe that’s just how she was always going to turn out. Either way, she eventually got bored an’ left, leaving me in the charge of a pop who never wanted to be a pop and could barely take care of himself, let alone a pup.  So I ran away from everything — my family, the Crystal Dimension, and especially spiritualists — and kept running until I ran into someone who actually  _ asked me what was wrong.” _   Zhe choked out a sob.  “Until I met you.”

Macy nodded.  Most of her memory of that day was cobbled together from people telling her what she’d told them, but she had a pretty strong composite picture in her head.  “You made up a story about running away to found a circus, and I offered to be a clown tamer.” She cracked a smile. “That offer’s still on the table.”

Despite everything, Robin smiled back.  “You already did that, though. You tamed  _ me.” _   Zhe glowed with a golden light, instantly launching Jawffee away.

Before zhe fell into the portal, zhe pulled up into a ball and tossed something toward Macy that zhe’d been clasping between zhir legs — the Root Sword, similarly glowing.  Macy swung it around, once again bisecting Shortbelle, then grabbed the exorcist by the arm and fell through the portal above with style.

The portal deposited them at the ceiling of the lobby, where they suddenly remembered that falling was usually a bad thing.  Robin scrambled to find purchase to slow zhirself and zhir friends, but zhe couldn’t quite grab onto the chandelier above. Then, with three sequential thuds, they all landed groin-first on a chain that had been suspended between the two stairways.

Wincing in pain, Robin looked at each end of the chain, which she now recognized to be Peace Master’s grappling hook.  Shortbelle and Jawffee were holding it, floating on their respective stairways and laughing hysterically. The two poltergeists sobered up instantly, simultaneously said, “And there’s the shark,” in an unaffected deadpan, and then disappeared, letting Robin, Macy, and PM rode the chain the rest of the way to the floor.

* * *

Not trusting his own talents, Peace Master had Vesper double-check that the two ghosts had indeed left.  He collected his payment, asked that none of them kindly ever bring this up again, and then noped off into the afternoon.  Macy couldn’t blame him; fleshy creatures tended to get hurt when things impacted with their bodies or vice versa. What a terrible, twisted fate that would be.

Speaking of things that impact other things, she examined the Root Sword, now back in its makeshift sheath.  For a few minutes there, she’d resigned herself to never seeing it again, but here it was in perfect working order.  She looked up at Robin. “Hey, thanks for, uh, saving this.”

Robin didn’t move.  Zhe was standing at the balcony, looking out across the lobby.  Apparently, in grasping for the chandelier, zhe’d loosened it, and sometime later it had fallen down; Archie and some of the house staff were cleaning it up now.  “Don’t mention it,” zhe said. “That’s what friends do. When one of us starts to break down, the other one picks up the pieces.”

“I can’t pick up your pieces forever.”

Zhe sighed.  “I know. Again, I’m sorry I let this escalate.  I should have talked with Pen from the start.”

“What do you think he paid those ghosts to do, anyway?  It was clearly more complicated than ‘prank the rainicorn-dog.’”

“Honestly?”  Zhe finally turned to look at Macy, and she could see that zhir ruby eyes were salt-rimmed.  “I think he wanted this.”

Macy looked quizzically at the chandelier.  “That?”

“No, not that.  He wanted me to tell you what I’d told him about my mom.”

“You told him before me‽”

“Macy, we’ve been hate-dating for months.  I’ve told him a  _ lot _ of things I haven’t told you.”

“Oh.  I mean, you  _ should, _ I’m just surprised you _ did.” _

Robin opened zhir mouth to protest, then closed it.

“But telling him clearly wasn’t enough for some reason.  You still had to tell  _ me.” _

“Yeah, I will admit, he’s not easy to talk to about this kind of stuff, and I don’t think he made the right move trying to dump it on you indirectly.  Assuming that’s actually what he was trying to do.”

“You need more friends, Robin.  Friends who aren’t children or romantic partners.”  A beat. “Well, that or a therapist.”

“I’ll pull up 자수정 주소성명록.”

“Wait, really?”  Macy raised an eyebrow.  “I expected more of a fight.”

Robin chuckled, a hoarse and empty sound.  “I’m out of fight for the day.”

Macy hugged zhir.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> D'aw, that's sweet.
> 
> So yeah, we've gotst Peace Master! His appearance shouldn't be _that_ surprising, given how many other minor characters I've been roping into this story, although given how many of those characters Adventure Time has it'd be pretty surprising if someone _expected_ it. Frankly, the most interesting thing about Peace Master was his relationship with Peppermint Butler, which doesn't give me a lot to work with in a world where that character's basically been reset and also I haven't introduced into the story; I decided to extrapolate that into his general feeling on cultists, but even so he ended up being a pretty functional character this chapter. If I ever return to him, I'll have to expand that.
> 
> As for our other new characters, Shortbelle & Jawffee are… well, they're a 


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